PURITANISM 


CLARENCE  MEII.*i 


PURITANISM 


BY 
CLARENCE'  MEILY 


CHICAGO 

CHARLES  H.  KERR  &  COMPANY 
CO-OPERATIVE 


Copyright  1911 
By  CHARLEB  H.  KBRR  &  COMPANT 


JOHN    F.  HIGGINS 

PRINTER  AND  BINDER 


376-382    MONROE  STREET 
CHICAGO,     ILLINOIS 


To  that  sorely  betrayed  and  some- 
what bedraggled  goddess,  "Liberty" 
with  whom,  however,  Puritanism  has 
prevented  the  author's  personal  ac- 
quaintance, this  little  book  is  affec- 
tionately inscribed. 


CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

WHAT   Is   MORALITY  ? 7 

CLASS  SYSTEMS  OF  MORALITY 18 

THE  ORIGIN  OF  PURITANISM 42 

THE  DECADENCE  OF  PURITANISM 67 

PURITANISM  AND  ASCETICISM 99 

PURITANISM  AND  THE  PROLETARIAT 114 

ABSTRACT  MORALITY  .  , 144 


PURITANISM 

CHAPTER  I 

WHAT  IS  MORALITY? 

The  association  of  living  forms  in  groups  or 
communities  goes  very  far  back  in  the  annals  of 
life  on  the  earth.  Among  vegetable  organisms 
association  occurs  mechanically,  inexorably, 
from  the  fact  of  their  inability  to  move  from 
place  to  place.  The  offspring  of  the  parent  plant 
are  of  necessity  confined  to  the  same  locality, 
and  generation  after  generation  is  fixed  in  the 
same  habitat.  It  is  not  apparent,  however,  that 
vegetation  gains  any  advantage  either  of  nutri- 
tion or  defense  from  the  fact  of  association. 
One  of  the  chief  practical  differences  between 
the  vegetable  and  animal  kingdoms  is  the  power 
of  free  locomotion  which  belongs  to  animals. 
With  the  acquisition  of  this  faculty,  association 
assumes  a  voluntary  character.  The  offspring  of 
the  parents  may  remain  together  in  the  primal 
and  natural  community  of  the  family,  or  they 
7 


8  PURITANISM 

may  scatter  in  permanent  separation.  This  al- 
ternative implies  that  if  association  continues  it 
does  so  because  of  definite  advantages  which  it 
affords  in  the  struggle  for  existence.  And,  vice 
versa,  the  fact  that  practically  all  animal  species, 
outside  the  prowling  carnivora,  are  gregarious, 
is  ample  demonstration  of  the  very  real  and  su- 
premely important  nature  of  these  advantages. 
With  the  strength  given  by  numbers,  defense  be- 
comes more  successful,  the  procurement  of  food 
surer,  shelter  better,  and  the  care  of  the  young 
easier  and  better  performed.  The  principle  of 
association  and  mutual  aid  is,  indeed,  one  of  the 
great  laws  of  life,  the  condition  and  cause  of 
success  in  the  contest  waged  against  an  adverse 
environment  by  the  vast  majority  of  sentient 
creatures. 

That  conjoint  effort  is  more  productive  and 
efficient  than  individual  labor  is  an  economic  tru- 
ism, the  practice  of  which  is  by  no  means  con- 
fined to  mankind.  The  hunting  pack  which  unite 
in  dragging  down  their  quarry,  the  pair  of  birds 
which  build  their  nest  together,  the  herd  which 
sends  out  scouts  to  discover  the  choicest  and 
safest  feeding  places,  all  act  in  obedience  to  this 
general  economic  law.  But  it  is  reserved  for 
man  to  rivet  yet  more  firmly  the  bonds  of  his 
associations,  to  increase  the  interdependence  of 


WHAT  IS  MORALITY?  9 

their  membership  one  upon  the  other,  by  the 
discovery  of  the  further  economic  principle  of 
the  division  of  labor,  in  the  application  of  which 
one  man  cultivates  and  becomes  adept  in  a  par- 
ticular art  or  labor  for  the  benefit  of  the  com- 
munity. By  this  special  adaptation  of  his  pow- 
ers his  dependence  upon  the  remainder  of  the 
group  for  necessities  which  he  cannot  produce 
is  firmly  fixed,  just  as,  in  turn,  is  fixed  the  de- 
pendence of  the  group  upon  him  for  his  own 
product.  The  severance  of  association  means, 
under  these  circumstances,  the  embarrassment  of 
the  group,  and  primeval  hardship  and  probable 
destruction  for  the  individual.  From  thence  for- 
ward man  is  a  social  creature  by  the  very  terms 
of  his  existence. 

Even  voluntary  association  implies  a  sacrifice 
of  personal  freedom.  Private  caprice,  wayward 
desire,  selfish  advantage  must  all  be  subordinated 
to  the  communal  interest.  Without  this,  the  as- 
sociation cannot  continue.  The  application  of 
the  principle  of  association  thus  engenders  a  con- 
flict between  the  interests  and  desires  of  the  in- 
dividual, and  the  interests  of  the  group  as  a 
whole.  The  desire,  as  well  as  the  immediate 
interest,  of  the  wolf  who  has  made  a  kill  is  to 
gorge  himself,  but  the  interests  of  the  pack  de- 
mand that  he  should  share  his  good  fortune  with 


10  PURITANISM 

his  fellows.  Unless  he  does  so,  one  of  the  chief 
purposes  of  the  association  is  defeated,  and  its 
bonds  weakened  accordingly.  So,  too,  the  in- 
stinctive desire  of  individuals  between  whom  a 
cause  of  difference  has  arisen,  is  to  settle  the 
merits  of  the  controversy  by  physical  encounter. 
But  as  the  group  would  be  rapidly  disintegrated 
by  conflicts  between  its  members,  the  group  in- 
terest demands  that  private  desire  shall  be  subor- 
dinated to  peaceable  adjustment  of  the  difficulty. 
"Thou  shalt  do  no  murder,"  is,  probably,  the 
oldest  law  and  moral  maxim  in  existence,  though 
it  is  not  thereby  meant  that  no  life  whatever 
shall  be  taken,  but  only  that  the  cohesion  of  the 
group  shall  not  be  destroyed  by  the  lawless  slay- 
ing of  its  members  by  each  other.  In  a  thou- 
sand ways  the  private  wish  of  the  individual 
must  bend  to  the  larger  purpose  of  the  social 
organization. 

The  perception  of  the  group  interest,  unlike 
the  recognition  of  personal  interest  or  desire,  is 
not  intuitive.  Only  the  exceptional  few  of  the 
community  have  wisdom  and  experience  suffi- 
cient to  anticipate  the  remote  if  far-reaching  re- 
sults of  anti-social  conduct  For  the  majority, 
the  realization  of  public  or  community  needs  and 
obligations  must  be  aided  by  their  formal  and 
explicit  statement,  while  obedience  to  them  is 


WHAT  IS   MORALITY?  11 

compelled  either  by  direct  coercion  or  by  attach- 
ing to  their  violations  penalties,  the  fear  of 
which  effectively  supplements  the  vaguer  motive 
of  concern  for  the  general  good.  Of  the  rules 
so  formulated,  three  general  classes  may  be  dis- 
tinguished. First,  those  which  are  of  such  obvi- 
ous and  vital  importance  that  they  receive  the 
sanction  of  physical  force  exerted  by  the  com- 
munity for  their  observance.  These  constitute 
laws.  Second,  those  which,  though  of  serious 
import  to  the  communal  welfare,  are  neverthe- 
less of  such  flexible  application  or  of  such  hid- 
den, remote  or  dubious  consequence  as  to  pre- 
clude a  common  consent  to  their  enforcement 
by  physical  strength,  leaving  them  to  find  their 
sanction  merely  in  public  opinion.  These  con- 
stitute morality.  Third,  those  rules  which,  while 
having  no  definite  public  significance,  yet  lend 
grace  and  facility  to  personal  intercourse  and  so 
aid  in  smoothly  carrying  forward  the  communal 
life.  These  are  enforced  by  the  opinion  of  inti- 
mates, and  constitute  manners.  Morality  is  thus 
seen  to  occupy  a  middle  ground  between  the  in- 
stitution of  law  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  insti- 
tution of  manners  on  the  other.  Like  law,  its 
formulas  define  and  interpret  the  public  good, 
the  group  interest;  but,  unlike  law,  it  is  denied 
the  supreme  sanction  of  enforcement  by  the 


12  PURITANISM 

sheer  physical  power  of  the  community.  Hence 
it  fails  to  receive  that  exact  and  painstaking 
statement,  that  precise  and  elaborate  interpreta- 
tion and  application,  which  are  features  of  all 
systems  of  jurisprudence.  Like  manners,  moral- 
ity must  depend  upon  the  opinion  and  attitude 
of  others  for  its  coercive  emphasis;  but,  unlike 
social  convention,  its  importance  is  of  public 
rather  than  of  personal  concern,  and  obedience 
to  its  precepts  is  induced  by  much  severer  repro- 
bation visited  upon  their  transgressor,  than  upon 
those  guilty  of  mere  ill-breeding.  The  line  be- 
tween morals  and  manners,  however,  remains 
indistinct,  manners,  in  an  effete  society,  tending 
to  rise  to  the  dignity  of  morals,  while  morals, 
grown  obsolete,  often  persist  as  social  conven- 
tions. 

Immoral  impulses  are  checked,  in  the  first  in- 
stance, by  the  fear  of  the  dislike,  aversion,  ostra- 
cism and  contempt  which  an  injured  or  outraged 
public  will  manifest  toward  the  offender.  In 
exceptional  instances,  this  motive  may  be  sup- 
plemented by  an  honest  and  generous  wish  to 
conserve  the  welfare  of  the  community  as  de- 
fined by  moral  precept,  though  usually  the  group 
interest  affected  is  so  remote  or  so  disguised,  or 
is  to  all  appearances  so  slightly  involved,  or 
loyalty  to  the  group  is  so  tenuous,  that  the  mere 


WHAT  IS  MORALITY?  13 

promotion  of  the  general  good  does  not  alone 
furnish  adequate  motive  for  moral  conduct. 
Neither  of  these  considerations,  however,  is 
commonly  regarded,  among  people  in  the  more 
primitive  stages  of  culture,  as  sufficiently  potent 
to  insure  moral  observance,  and  accordingly  it  is 
deemed  necessary  to  secure  some  additional  sanc- 
tion which  shall  restrain  the  wayward  and  rebel- 
lious from  moral  laxity.  The  realization  of  the 
communal  necessities  which  are  voiced  in  moral 
precepts,  and  the  formulation  of  the  precepts 
themselves,  being  matters  requiring  unusual  in- 
tellectual power,  foresight  and  wisdom,  natur- 
ally fall  into  the  hands  of  those  in  the  associa- 
tion who  possess  superior  mental  attainments 
and  who  thus  become,  as  it  were,  the  custodians 
of  morals,  possessing  not  only  the  privilege  of 
ethical  enactment  but  the  duty  of  exhortation 
to  ethical  conduct.  Now,  with  all  primitive  peo- 
ples, these  functionaries  of  superior  intelligence 
are  also  the  priests,  the  persons  authorized  to 
address  the  gods  and  to  interpret  the  divine  will 
to  men.  Very  naturally,  therefore,  an  additional 
and  final  sanction  for  the  practice  of  virtue  is 
declared  by  the  custodians  of  morals  to  lie  in  the 
divine  pleasure,  which  demands  the  service  of 
righteousness  from  all  those  who  would  please 
the  gods,  and  which  will  visit  with  condign  pun- 


14  PURITANISM 

ishment  those  who  persist  in  evil  doing.  Moral- 
ity thus  becomes  linked  with  religion,  its  pre- 
cepts are  represented  as  embodying  the  divine 
will,  and  their  violation  becomes  sin,  the  trans- 
gression of  the  will  of  the  gods,  to  be  visited  by 
the  terrors  of  the  divine  wrath  both  in  this  life 
and  in  the  life  to  come.  The  religious  sanction 
which  morality  thus  acquires  is  enormously  pow- 
erful, particularly  amongst  peoples  in  the  lower 
stages  of  enlightenment,  whose  superstitious 
minds  unquestioningly  accept  the  instruction 
thus  received.  So  important,  indeed,  is  this  re- 
ligious sanction  that  it  may  be  regarded  almost 
as  affording  a  distinguishing  mark  of  morality 
as  against  mere  manners  and  ceremonial  con- 
ventions. 

The  prestige  gained  by  morality  when  enun- 
ciated as  a  revelation  of  the  divine  will  operates 
in  two  ways.  First,  it  inspires  a  direct  terror 
of  the  divine  anger  and  of  the  punishments  to 
be  accordingly  suffered,  and  so  furnishes  a  new 
and  fresh  motive  for  the  practice  of  righteous- 
ness, the  potency  of  which  is  but  little  impaired 
by  the  fact  that  the  fears  inspired  are  imagi- 
nary rather  than  actual.  Second,  the  aversion 
which  the  public  feels  toward  the  person  dis- 
covered to  be  guilty  of  immorality  is,  by  the  re- 
ligious aspect  of  the  case,  intensified  to  such 


WHAT  IS  MORALITY?  15 

horror,  loathing  and  detestation  as  may  fittingly 
be  exhibited  toward  one  who  has  incurred  the 
wrath  of  deity  and  who  is  numbered  amongst 
the  enemies  of  the  gods.  The  primary  sanction 
of  public  opinion  is  thus  stimulated,  educated 
and  directed  until  any  deficiency  which  may  have 
originally  impaired  its  efficiency  is  removed,  and 
it  becomes  a  redoubtable  agency  in  guiding  the 
recalcitrant  soul  into  the  paths  of  virtue. 

Morality  always  presents  itself  as  a  conflict 
between  the  private  impulse  and  inclination  of 
the  individual,  and  the  more  remote  and  abstract 
but  more  important  interests  of  the  group,  clan 
or  class  in  its  collective  aspect.  And  because 
morality  expresses  the  popular  will  and  opinion, 
and  because  it  has  the  sanction  of  religious 
teaching,  disobedience  to  its  injunctions  assumes 
the  guise  of  rebellion,  transgression,  sin.  The 
sense  of  conflict  and  struggle  which  ever  haunts 
the  spirit  of  man,  and  which  is  primarily  a  sub- 
jective reflection  of  his  contest  with  an  adverse 
environment,  with  the  bufferings,  betrayals  and 
parsimony  of  oblivious  nature,  receives  an  added 
emphasis  from  this  secondary  antagonism  of  his 
most  rudimentary  instincts  by  the  prescribed 
duties  and  calculated  restrictions  of  the  communal 
life  which  is  itself  formed  for  the  purpose  of  aid- 
ing in  the  general  struggle  for  existence.  This 


16  PURITANISM 

conception  of  the  battle  of  good  and  evil  finds  ex- 
pression in  endless  legends  and  traditions,  from 
Michael,  the  archangel,  triumphing  over  Satan, 
or  St.  George  slaying  the  dragon,  down  to  the 
latest  civic-righteousness  fiction  of  our  popular 
magazines.  And  if  the  good  must  always  prove 
eventually  victorious,  it  is  because  the  good  is 
felt  to  be  synonymous  with  the  triumph  of 
life,  the  furtherance  of  progress,  the  fulfill- 
ment of  human  destiny.  For  however  irk- 
some moral  precept  may  be,  or  however  fan- 
tastically it  may  be  explained  or  enforced,  it 
must  be  remembered  that  while  the  association 
continues  homogeneous,  that  is,  before  the  de- 
velopment of  private  property  has  given  rise  to 
different  economic  classes  within  the  group  hav- 
ing hostile  interests  and  aims,  both  laws  and 
moral  codes  really  represent  the  true  welfare 
of  the  species,  and,  in  most  instances,  of  the 
refractory  individual  as  well.  With  the  rise  of 
private  property,  however,  and  the  consequent 
formation  of  antagonistic  economic  classes,  a 
collective  common  interest,  uniform  with  all 
members  of  the  group,  ceases  in  large  measure 
to  exist,  and  both  law  and  morality  come  rather 
to  embody  but  the  interest,  prestige  and  welfare 
of  the  dominant,  proprietary  class.  From  this 
on,  it  is  only  in  a  secondary  fashion,  and  when 

c 

• 


WHAT    IS    MORALITY?  17 

viewed  in  the  perspective  of  a  long  historical 
evolution,  that  law  and  morality  can  be  said  to 
have  also  ministered  to  the  general  progress  of 
the  race. 


CHAPTER  II 

CLASS  SYSTEMS  OF  MORALITY 

Notwithstanding  the  naive  confidence  in  the 
realization  of  liberty,  equality  and  fraternity 
which  illuminated  the  beginning  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  he  would  be  a  hardy  debater 
who  would  venture  now  to  deny  the  existence 
of  economic  classes  in  modern  society,  or  to 
question  the  fundamental  and  irreconcilable  na- 
ture of  their  enmities.  Still  less  would  any  one 
question  the  existence  of  such  classes  in  the 
past,  when  the  legalized  status  of  master  and 
slave,  of  lord  and  serf,  made  cavil  upon  the  sub- 
ject impossible.  In  the  slow  progress  achieved 
by  our  barbarian  ancestors  through  the  match- 
ing of  their  inventive  powers  against  an  adverse 
environment,  tools  were  created  and  gradually 
improved  until  a  point  was  reached,  the  most 
momentous  thus  far  encountered  in  human  his- 
tory, where,  with  the  aid  of  tools,  a  man  might 
produce  by  his  labor  not  only  sufficient  for  his 
own  needs  but  a  surplus  of  which  he  could  be 
despoiled  without  materially  impairing  his  effi- 
ciency as  a  laborer.  At  this  point  a  use  was 
discovered  for  the  captives  taken  in  battle. 
18 


CLASS   SYSTEMS   OF   MORALITY  19 

They  became  possible  subjects  of  exploitation. 
In  the  picturesque  language  of  a  contemporary, 
"Mankind  abandoned  cannibalism  just  as  soon  as 
it  was  discovered  that  more  meals  could  be  got 
from  a  captive  by  keeping  him  alive  and  work- 
ing him  than  by  killing  and  eating  him."  A  pro- 
found alteration  was  thus  wrought  in  the 
structure  of  the  human  association — from  the 
homogeneity  of  barbarian  communistic  society  to 
the  heterogeneity  of  the  class  organization  which 
ushers  in  the  stage  of  development  we  know  as 
civilization.  Society  became  split  into  two  hos- 
tile economic  class — the  master  or  proprietary 
class  which  owned  the  slaves  as  private  property 
and  lived  by  appropriating  the  surplus  product 
of  slave  labor,  and  the  slaves  themselves  whose 
labor  sustained  both  them  and  their  masters. 
The  basic  fact  of  this,  as  of  all,  class  organiza- 
tion was  that  of  exploitation — the  fact  that  a 
portion  of  the  fruit  of  one  man's  labor  is  taken 
without  recompense  by  another  man  under  the 
safeguard  of  legal  and  moral  protection  and  ap- 
proval. And  thus  arise  the  radical  and  funda- 
mental divergence  of  interests  and  the  profound, 
implacable  and  unremitting  class  warfare,  which 
constitute  the  key  to  the  interpretation  of  all  the 
annals  and  institutions  of  civilization. 


20  PURITANISM 

In  the  new  organization  of  society  thus 
brought  about,  the  "intellectuals,"  to  whose  cus- 
tody law  and  morality  had  been  perforce  com- 
mitted and  who  were  the  priests,  the  wise  men, 
the  jurists,  legislators  and  moral  exhorters  of 
the  tribe,  occupied  a  somewhat  anomalous  place. 
Exceptional  wisdom  or  superior  mental  equip- 
ment is  not  commonly  united  with  martial  prow- 
ess, especially  when  prowess  is  synonymous 
with  brute  strength.  The  captives,  and  there- 
fore slaves,  falling  to  the  lot  of  the  intellectuals 
were  accordingly  few,  and  insufficient  to  give 
them  place  as  members  of  the  proprietary  class. 
Nor  were  the  intellectuals  either  fitted  or  accus- 
tomed to  supply  their  own  necessities  directly  by 
manual  labor.  For,  after  all,  it  is  only  manual 
labor  which  effects  that  modification  of  mate- 
rial substances  which  fits  them  to  the  satisfac- 
tion of  bodily  needs.  Mere  intellectual  effort, 
however  valuable  and  deserving,  is  not  directly 
productive  of  material  goods,  and  therefore  it 
must  always  be  bartered  or  exchanged  before  it 
yields  a  livelihood  to  him  who  performs  it.  But 
in  a  class  society,  the  exploitation  which  feeds 
fat  the  proprietary  class  leaves  it  the  only  class 
possessed  of  the  means  of  purchasing  or  of  com- 
pensating intellectual  labor,  and  it  is  to  the 
proprietary  or  master  class,  therefore,  that  the 


CLASS  SYSTEMS  OF   MORALITY  21 

intellectual  must  always  turn  for  a  supply  of 
those  material  goods  without  which  he  cannot 
live.  Hence  it  is  that,  with  the  creation  of  eco- 
nomic classes,  the  intellectuals,  the  trustees  of 
law  and  morals,  become  of  necessity  the  paid 
retainers  of  the  master  class. 

The  unity  of  interest  which  characterizes  prim- 
itive communistic  society  necessarily  pales  be- 
fore the  internecine  struggle  which  exploitation 
and  the  establishment  of  the  class  system  en- 
gender. Even  were  no  other  circumstance  oper- 
ative to  distort  law  and  morality  from  their 
pristine  function  of  enunciating  the  common 
interest,  the  very  fact  of  the  existence  of  a  class 
warfare  within  the  group  would  suffice  to  make 
it  impossible  that  these  institutions  should  con- 
tinue to  embody  the  true  interests  of  all  citi- 
zens irrespective  of  their  class  allegiance.  To 
do  this  would  require  both  law  and  morality  to 
divide  within  themselves  into  antagonistic  and 
contradictory  codes,  one  set  expressive  of  the 
masters'  interests,  the  other,  of  those  of  the 
slaves.  But  the  receipt  of  income  by  the  intel- 
lectuals from  the  proprietary  class  which  alone 
can  yield  it,  speedily  determines  the  fate 
of  both  law  and  morals.  There  need  be 
no  illusion  about  the  position  of  a  paid 
retainer.  He  must  serve  his  employer's 


22  PURITANISM 

will,  he  must  promote  his  employer's  interest,  or 
his  pay  stops.  His  continued  existence,  particu- 
larly upon  the  plane  of  luxury  and  ease  to  which 
he  has  become  accustomed,  depends  directly 
upon  his  subserviency.  Law  and  morals,  there- 
fore, promptly  become  but  embodiments  of  the 
class  concerns  of  the  proprietary  class  alone,  are 
made  to  sanctify  and  defend  exploitation  and 
class  superiority  and  control,  while  for  the  work- 
ing class  they  express  but  the  antithesis  and 
denial  of  all  its  true  interests.  Thus,  the  obedi- 
ence of  the  workers  is  vital  to  the  masters'  safe- 
ty and  welfare,  while  rebellion  only  can  con- 
serve their  own  welfare;  yet  law  and  morality 
must  always  enjoin  and  enforce  obedience  and 
condemn  and  punish  rebellion.  So,  exploitation 
is  the  masters'  method  of  livelihood,  while  it  rep- 
resents a  robbery  of  the  worker;  yet  law  and 
morality  must  require  the  servant  to  yield  the 
surplus  of  his  labor  peaceably  to  his  owner.  It 
may  be  questioned  whether  in  any  class  system 
of  morality  a  residuum  can  be  found  which  con- 
tinues to  represent  the  entire  group  interest  in- 
dependently of  class  considerations.  Even  the 
most  elementary  maxims  take  on  a  class  color. 
Thus,  "Thou  shalt  not  kill,"  comes  to  forbid 
only  the  slaying  of  a  member  of  the  master 
class,  and  by  no  means  prevents  the  master  tak- 


CLASS  SYSTEMS  OF   MORALITY  23 

ing  the  life  of  the  slave,  as  in  Rome,  where  a 
slave  might  be  killed  and  fed  to  the  master's 
eels  without  any  violation  of  law.  Nor  can  such 
power  of  life  and  death  over  the  slave  be  at- 
tributed to  his  original  position  as  a  captive  who 
held  his  life  at  the  victor's  mercy,  since  the  pow- 
er persisted  long  after  the  slave's  character  as  a 
captive  taken  in  battle  had  been  merged  and 
lost  in  the  general  body  of  slave  property.  It 
is  explicable  only  on  the  theory  that  the  slave, 
as  such,  was  outside  the  bounds  of  class,  and 
therefore  of  human,  fellowship,  and  because  the 
successful  maintenance  of  the  system  required 
that  no  assuagement  of  terror  should  be  afforded 
the  slave  by  the  legal  safeguarding  of  his  physi- 
cal integrity.  In  later  times,  and  in  freer  and 
more  highly  organized  societies,  indeed,  the  pure- 
ly group  interests  in  a  measure  reassert  them- 
selves, as  in  sanitary  laws,  and  the  like.  The 
workers  may  even  be  so  far  recognized  as  mem- 
bers of  the  group  as  to  be  given  a  perfunctory 
protection,  such  concessions  being  either  dic- 
tated by  the  exigencies  of  production,  or  inspired 
by  fear  of  an  insurrection  of  the  laboring  class. 
But  in  the  main,  under  a  class  organization  of 
society,  the  function  of  law  is  merely  to  crystal- 
lize into  formal  statement  the  dominance  of  the 
masters,  and  to  adjust  their  private  differences 


24  PURITANISM 

peaceably  between  themselves  so  that  their  posi- 
tion may  not  be  imperiled  by  internal  strife, 
while  morality  becomes  in  turn  but  the  fainter 
yet  even  more  faithful  echo  of  purely  class 
interests. 

The  business  of  the  male  citizen  of  a  barbarian 
community  is  that  of  a  hunter  and  fighter,  while 
the  women  are  employed  in  household  drudgery 
and  the  exercise  of  those  primitive  arts  which 
are  the  faint  prototypes  of  the  industries  of 
civilization.  But  the  thorough-going  commun- 
ism which  marks  this  era  in  social  evolution 
prevents  the  position  of  women  being  reduced  to 
that  of  a  true  slavery.  While  their  labors  are 
more  onerous  and  persistent  than  those  of  their 
male  companions,  they  are  less  hazardous,  and 
the  universal  right  to  share  freely  in  the  com- 
munal wealth  frees  even  the  female  employment 
from  any  actual  exploitation.  The  difference  be- 
tween male  and  female  vocation  is  rather  an 
instance  of  the  primitive  division  of  labor,  than 
the  mark  of  a  real  servile  exploitation  of 
women. 

The  normal  attitude  of  barbarian  communi- 
ties towards  each  other  is  one  of  actual  or  at 
least  potential  warfare.  The  member  of  an  alien 
tribe  is  perforce  an  enemy  just  as  the  beasts  that 
prowl  the  jungle  are  also  enemies.  The  bar- 


CLASS  SYSTEMS   OF  MORALITY  25 

barian  is  therefore  a  warrior.  But  he  is  also  a 
hunter,  a  fisherman,  and  in  later  times,  a  herds- 
man and  agriculturist.  Peaceful  industries  find 
place  among  his  pursuits.  Though  a  warrior, 
he  has  not  yet  become  a  professional  soldier. 
With  the  rise  of  chattel  slavery,  however,  society 
crystallizes  into  a  distinctively  military  mold.  A 
fixed  military  establishment  becomes  imperative, 
both  to  hold  the  slave  property  in  subjection,  and 
to  add  to  it  by  further  conquest.  At  first  all 
males  of  the  master  class  bear  arms.  Later,  the 
military  becomes  detached  from  the  balance  of 
the  class  as  a  special  caste  or  occupation.  Later 
still,  the  legionaries  become,  like  the  intellectuals, 
the  mercenaries  or  paid  retainers  of  the  proprie- 
tors. But  at  all  times  the  military  organization 
and  habit  of  life,  together  with  the  direct  impli- 
cations of  the  slave  relation  itself,  determine  the 
conventional  morality  of  the  slave  society.  As 
the  slave  property  is,  for  the  most  part,  alien  in 
origin,  being  composed  of  the  conquered  mem- 
bers of  foreign  tribes  and  peoples,  the  support  of 
the  system  demands  first  of  all  patriotism,  or 
devotion  to  one's  own  dominant  tribe,  city  or 
commonwealth,  as  a  supreme  virtue.  In  the 
southern  states  of  the  American  Republic  be- 
fore the  Civil  War,  where  the  distinction  be- 
tween master  and  slave  followed  racial  lines,  this 


26  PURITANISM 

virtue  took  the  form  of  pride  of  race,  the  denun- 
ciation of  miscegenation,  and  the  somewhat 
frantic  outcry  for  the  preservation  of  "racial 
integrity."  In  classic  antiquity,  however,  slaves 
and  masters  were  of  the  same,  or  substantially 
the  same,  race,  and  the  differentiation  pro- 
ceeded no  further  than  membership  in  different 
tribes  or  citizenship  in  different  commonwealths. 
Patriotism,  therefore,  became  the  characteristic 
and  cardinal  virtue  of  this  era.  To  this  were 
added  the  essentially  military  virtues  of  personal 
courage,  obedience,  truthfulness,  and  the  like. 
As  the  weapons  of  that  period  required  great 
bodily  strength  and  skill  for  their  effective  use, 
athletics  and  the  cultivation  of  physical  prowess 
and  endurance  also  assumed  the  role  of  virtues. 
With  the  creation  of  a  master  class  founded 
upon  the  institution  of  private  property  came 
the  need  of  preserving  and  transmitting  this 
property,  and  the  privileged  status  it  conferred, 
from  generation  to  generation;  in  other  words, 
the  need  of  class  preservation.  To  accomplish 
this  purpose  it  was  necessary  that  the  master 
have  a  restricted  and  definitely  ascertained  prog- 
eny in  whom  the  right  of  inheritance  might  rest. 
To  effect  the  first  of  these  objects,  that  is  re- 
striction of  progeny,  the  loose  sexual  relations 
of  the  barbarian  period  gave  place  to  the  mon- 


CLASS  SYSTEMS  OF  MORALITY  27 

ogamous  form  of  marriage.  To  carry  out  the 
second,  that  is  to  insure  the  identity  of  the  off- 
spring selected  to  inherit,  as  indeed  the  children 
of  the  father,  the  virtue  of  female  chastity,  which 
Balzac  mordantly  described  as  "man's  greatest 
invention,"  was  evolved,  to  be  enforced,  at  least 
in  the  beginning,  by  the  cloistered  seclusion  of 
the  wife.  In  this  way  the  marriage  relation,  with 
its  attendant  moral  conceptions,  was  fashioned 
into  an  effective  agency  for  preserving  the  mas- 
ter class  in  assured  dominance  through  succes- 
sive generations.  The  conception  of  male  chastity, 
however,  had  not  yet  been  formed,  that  par- 
ticular virtue  being  unnecessary  for  the  accom- 
plishment of  the  purpose  in  hand.  Masters 
indulged  in  concubinage,  or  even  more  promiscu- 
ous relations,  without  thought  of  evil,  it  being, 
of  course,  enacted  in  the  laws  that  the  children 
of  concubines  should  not  inherit.  Nor  was 
chastity,  or  even  an  orderly  marital  relation, 
deemed  applicable  to  slaves.  The  female  slave 
held  her  person  at  her  master's  pleasure,  while 
the  male  slave  was  a  mere  breeding  animal. 
Polygamy,  which  appeared  later,  was  probably 
the  result  of  an  attempt  to  give  to  concubinage 
a  more  settled  and  legitimate  character. 

As  the  subjection  of  the  workers  under  the 
chattel  slave  system  is  secured  through  the  im- 


28  PURITANISM 

position  of  sheer  physical  force  and  terror  and 
not  through  any  restraint  of  moral  suasion,  mor- 
ality under  such  a  system  is  held  not  to  concern 
the  workers  but  to  have  significance  for  the 
masters  only.  Like  the  service  of  the  gods,  its 
observance  is  something  too  sacred  to  be  con- 
taminated by  servile  touch.  But  as  the  practice 
of  morality  was  confined  to  the  masters,  so  the 
protection  of  virtuous  conduct  in  others,  shielded 
the  master  class  alone.  The  slave  master  of 
classic  antiquity  owed  no  moral  obligation  of 
any  sort  to  his  slaves.  The  notion  of  such  an 
obligation  was  unthinkable.  On  the  contrary,  in 
order  to  inspire  a  subjugating  terror  in  the  slaves, 
unbridled  license  for  cruelty  toward  them  was 
given  the  masters,  the  exercise  of  which  devel- 
oped that  strange  and  horrible  appetite  for  scenes 
of  physical  anguish  the  tales  of  which  incarna- 
dine the  period  of  Roman  decadence.  The  spirit 
of  cruelty  permeated  the  whole  of  society,  and  a 
callous  indifference  to  bodily  suffering  or  even 
a  monstrous  enjoyment  of  torn  flesh  and  scorch- 
ing limbs  testified  to  the  detestable  perversion  of 
normal  human  feeling  which  the  industrial  sys- 
tem had  wrought.  Add  to  this  the  drunkenness, 
licentiousness,  administrative  corruption  and 
moral  degeneracy  which  resulted  from  the  ex- 
treme concentration  of  wealth,  which,  in  turn,  is 


CLASS    SYSTEMS   OF   MORALITY  29 

an  inseparable  incident  of  private  property,  and 
one  may  form  a  picture  of  that  pagan  world 
against  which  the  Christian  faith  hurled  itself  as 
a  revolutionary  propaganda.  The  criticism 
which  that  brilliant  philosophic  charlatan,  Fried- 
rich  Nietzsche,  launched  at  Christianity,  that  it 
was  the  morality  of  slaves,  is,  in  point  of  fact, 
;is  regards  the  early  church,  strictly  accurate, 
though  few  would  echo  the  contempt  for  it  with 
which,  on  this  account,  that  pseudo-aristocrat  in- 
flated himself.  The  basic  tenet  of  Christianity, 
that  of  human  brotherhood,  is  but  the  idealized 
moral  phrasing  of  that  principle  of  association 
which  is  ever  the  counterpoise  by  which  the  weak 
match  themselves  against  the  strong.  The  early 
Christian  communism,  reminiscent  of  its  more 
primitive  barbarian  counterpart,  was  and  ever 
has  been  the  answer  of  the  propertiless  worker 
to  the  exploitation  of  the  proprietor.  The  Chris- 
tian detestation  of  war  struck  at  the  very  founda- 
tion of  the  chattel  slave  system  of  antiquity. 
Coming  as  a  reaction  against  the  libertinism  and 
debauchery  of  the  time,  Christianity  saturated  it- 
self with  the  mystical  asceticism  of  the  East. 
Indeed,  at  every  point  early  Christianity  was  the 
revolutionary  antithesis  of  the  existing  social 
order,  so  that  it  is  no  real  wonder  that  the 
Roman  state,  notoriously  tolerant  of  alien  relig- 


30  PURITANISM 

ious  faiths,  yet  greeted  the  gospel  with  the  re- 
lentless and  bloody  persecutions  which  crowned 
with  martyrdom  this  first  of  proletarian  revolts. 
It  is  an  economic  maxim  that  productiveness 
increases  in  proportion  as  the  freer  constitution 
of  society  insures  the  workers  an  absolutely 
larger  and  more  secure  portion  of  the  product 
of  their  labor.  In  other  words,  freer  social 
forms  have  the  direct  effect  of  stimulating  pro- 
duction. When,  therefore,  in  process  of  time, 
the  wasteful  and  inefficient  methods  of  chattel 
slave  cultivation  had  exhausted  the  lands  of 
Southern  Europe,  and  when,  also,  it  became  nec- 
essary to  bring  under  cultivation  the  less  fertile 
lands  of  the  North,  it  grew  imperative  that 
chattel  slavery  should  yield  to  a  freer  form 
of  industrial  organization.  The  resulting  social 
revolution,  being  to  the  interest  of  the  master 
class,  was  protracted  through  centuries  of  slow 
and  frictionless  mutation,  became  a  component 
part  of  the  dawning  Celtic  and  Teutonic  civiliza- 
tion, and,  in  itself,  quite  escaped  the  notice  of 
the  superficial  historians  who,  until  recently, 
when  history  was  placed  upon  a  scientific  founda- 
tion, were  the  chroniclers  of  Western  progress. 
The  principal  industry  of  the  time,  the  one  upon 
which  the  vast  mass  of  the  people  depended  for 
support,  was  agriculture.  The  restless  migra- 


CLASS   SYSTEMS   OF   MORALITY  31 

tions  of  the  northern  barbarians,  our  Celtic,  Teu- 
tonic and  Slavonic  ancestors,  seeking  a  perma- 
nent feeding  ground  upon  the  face  of  the  earth, 
the  decadence  and  dissolution  of  that  mighty 
fabric  of  empire,  the  Roman  state,  and  the  dis- 
organization and  chaos  which  followed,  all  com- 
pelled the  persistence  of  the  military  organiza- 
tion of  society — made,  indeed,  of  every  freeman 
a  soldier.  The  unique  problem  was  thus  pre- 
sented of  organizing  the  industry  of  agriculture 
upon  a  military  basis,  and  in  such  fashion  as  to 
give  to  the  workers  an  increased  measure  of  lib- 
erty and  security.  To  this  difficult  problem  the 
feudal  system  furnished  the  ingenious  and  ade- 
quate answer.  The  slave  was  transmuted  into 
the  serf,  the  master  became  the  lord.  Surren- 
dering his  right  of  absolute  property  in  the  body 
of  the  worker,  the  proprietor  nevertheless  owned 
the  land  upon  which  the  laborer  was  obliged  to 
toil,  the  land  to  which  he  was  legally  bound 
and  which  he  could  not  leave  without  the  lord's 
permission.  But  to  a  portion  of  this  land  the 
serf  acquired  a  right  of  occupancy  and  use  not 
unlike  that  of  the  modern  tenant.  For  this  right 
he  paid  certain  rents  and  was  subjected  to  cer- 
tain exactions  the  only  merit  of  which  was  that 
they  were,  for  the  most  part,  fairly  well  defined 
by  custom.  For  a  prescribed  period,  for  in- 


32  PURITANISM 

stance,  he  labored  upon  the  lands  of  his  lord,  but 
for  the  balance  of  the  time  he  was  free  to 
cultivate  his  own  small  holding.  The  measure  of 
his  exploitation,  therefore,  while  severe  enough, 
had  the  very  great  advantage  of  definite  limita- 
tion. Moreover,  the  serf  began  to  have  the  sem- 
blance of  personal  rights.  In  exchange  for  his 
fealty,  his  lord  engaged  to  preserve  him  from  in- 
jurious violence.  The  integrity  of  his  family 
relations  was  vaguely  acknowledged.  His  tenure 
of  his  plot  of  ground  became  a  conceded  and 
permanent  right  which  received  legal  protection 
and  could  be  transmitted  to  his  descendants. 
Though  the  relation  of  lord  and  serf  partook 
largely  of  a  paternal  character,  it  was  also  one 
of  reciprocal  obligations,  fixed  by  custom,  which, 
on  the  whole,  it  was  to  the  lord's  interest  to 
recognize  and  fulfill.  Personal  liberty  for  the 
worker  was.  indeed,  afar  off,  but  security  for 
person  and  property  was  slowly  gained. 

As  society  remained  militant  in  respect  of  the 
proprietary  class,  that  is,  as  the  chief  business 
of  that  class  continued  to  be  fighting,  so  the 
virtues  of  the  feudal  era  remained  those  reflec- 
tive of  a  military  organization — physical  courage 
and  prowess,  obedience,  truthfulness,  honor  and 
so  on.  Loyalty  to  the  king  took  the  place  of 
patriotism,  but  served  the  same  purpose  of  con- 


CLASS   SYSTEMS  OF  MORALITY  33 

serving  and  increasing  class  cohesion.  Trade, 
commerce  and  usury  or  the  lending  of  money  at 
interest,  were  despised;  but  war,  pillage,  piracy 
and  enforced  tribute  were,  as  aforetime,  highly 
esteemed.  But  in  two  particulars,  at  least,  feudal 
morality  deserves  special  discussion.  First,  in 
relation  to  marriage.  Second,  as  to  the  part 
which  came  to  be  played  by  morality,  through 
the  instrumentality  of  the  feudal  church,  in  keep- 
ing the  working  class  in  restraint. 

Chattel  slaves  had  been  personal  property ;  and 
the  fluid  nature  of  this  property,  as  well  as  the 
rapidity  with  which  wealth  accumulated  under 
that  system,  made  the  matter  of  inheritance  of 
relatively  less  importance  than  it  was  later  to 
acquire  under  feudalism.  Feudal  property  was 
landed  property,  and,  as  such,  peculiarly  adapted 
to  transmission  by  inheritance.  Besides,  the 
meager  wealth  of  the  feudal  period  required 
strict  conservation  from  generation  to  genera- 
tion, and  could  not,  if  it  were  to  sustain  the 
social  fabric,  be  periodically  dissipated  by  dis- 
tribution to  numerous  heirs.  Again,  the  unin- 
terrupted continuance  of  feudal  rents  and  servi- 
tudes was  essential  to  the  military  system,  which 
was  one  of  prescribed  levies,  and  the  concomi- 
tant status,  property  and  privilege  of  the  nobility 
must,  of  course,  also  be  continuous.  The  heredi- 


34  PURITANISM 

tary  principle  therefore  assumed  a  transcendent 
importance.  Not  only  was  class  preservation 
dependent  upon  it,  but  the  fate  of  the  very  sys- 
tem itself  was  bound  up  in  it.  The  effect  of 
these  circumstances  upon  the  institution  of  mar- 
riage was  most  profound.  The  feudal  marriage 
was  not  only  monogamous,  but  it  was  the  sever- 
est monogamy,  and  the  most  inflexible  and  ada- 
mantine union,  the  world  has  ever  known.  Once 
contracted,  it  was,  for  all  practical  purposes,  in- 
dissoluble. Only  one  authority  existed,  the 
Roman  pontiff,  who  could  dissolve  it  for  any 
cause,  and  he  would  not.  Side  by  side  with  this 
development  of  marriage  went  a  corresponding 
emphasis  upon  the  virtue  of  female  chastity. 
This  was  the  crowning,  and,  aside  from  domes- 
tic thrift,  practically  the  only  virtue  recognized 
in  women.  The  supreme  duty  of  the  married 
woman  was  to  furnish  a  legitimate  male  heir 
to  continue  the  family  name  and  power.  Fecun- 
dity to  this  extent  was  also  a  virtue.  Aside  from 
this,  the  woman's  life  and  identity  were  so  com- 
pletely merged  in  the  husband  that  she  became  a 
negligible  quantity.  As  the  chastity  of  females 
of  the  proprietary  class  assumed  so  great  an  im- 
portance, the  violation  of  this  chastity,  carrying 
with  it  the  utter  ruin  of  the  woman's  marital 
prospects  and  leaving  entrance  into  a  nunnery 


CLASS   SYSTEMS   OF    MORALITY  35 

her  sole  possible  refuge,  became  a  serious  of- 
fense which  her  male  relatives  would  not  be  slow 
to  visit  with  drastic  punishment.  A  sort  of  re- 
flex chastity  was  thus  imposed  upon  the  males 
of  the  class,  with  respect  to  women  of  the  aris- 
tocracy. And  from  this  protective  attitude  to- 
ward ladies  of  the  nobility,  enhanced  by  the 
love  of  stately  ceremonial  which  lingered  as  a 
legacy  from  a  not  very  remote  barbarism,  was 
developed  that  chivalry  and  courtesy  toward 
women  of  aristocratic  rank,  which  constituted  one 
of  the  finest  and  most  charming  traits  of  the 
feudal  noble.  But  chivalry  and  courtesy  were 
reserved  for  women  of  the  proprietary  class 
alone.  Towards  women  of  the  working  class, 
the  correct  noble  attitude  was  one  of  contemptu- 
ous brutality,  coupled  with  a  quite  unregulated 
sexual  license.  Nor  has  chivalry,  in  this  regard, 
ever  succeeded  in  rising  above  its  traditional 
class  limitations,  as  may  easily  be  observed  by 
noting  the  bearing  of  the  modern  gentleman  to- 
ward the  mistress,  and  toward  the  maid. 

But  monogamous  marriage  alone,  even 
though  indissoluble,  did  not  furnish  a  sufficient 
restriction  upon  the  number  of  heirs,  to  meet 
the  exigencies  of  feudal  inheritance.  Not  only 
were  illegitimates  debarred  from  the  right  to  in- 
herit, and,  incidentally,  visited  by  the  most  in- 


36  PURITANISM 

tense  disgrace,  but  only  one  child  of  the  legiti- 
mate progeny,  the  eldest  male,  was  permitted  to 
succeed  to  the  title  of  nobility,  the  family  prop- 
erties, and  the  rank  and  power  of  the  sire.  The 
right  of  primogeniture  completed  the  curious 
structure  of  class  domination.  Under  these  cir- 
cumstances, the  family  relation  assumed  a  social 
importance  which  it  had  not  known  since  the 
barbarian  period.  Then  it  had  furnished  the 
basis  of  the  tribal  bond,  the  only  form  of  social 
organization.  But  the  family  which  was  then 
important  was  a  contemporaneous  group.  Under 
feudalism  it  was  a  line  of  descent.  As  feudal 
rank  and  privilege  came  from  the  ancestor,  so 
the  ancestor  became  of  immense  significance,  and 
both  the  status  and  worth  of  men  were  deter- 
mined not  by  what  they  were,  but  by  what  their 
forebears  had  been.  Pride  of  family  was  added 
to  the  other  distinctively  feudal  virtues.  The 
vacuous  remark  sometimes  heard  from  modern 
pulpits  and  professorial  chairs,  that  the  family 
is  the  foundation  of  the  state,  is  the  aimless 
ghost  of  this  feudal  conception  of  the  class  im- 
portance of  that  relation.  It  is  almost  needless 
to  add  that  the  super-sanctity  of  the  feudal  mar- 
riage, together  with  female  chastity  and  all  its 
other  attendant  virtues,  was  enforced  with  the 
utmost  zeal  and  rigor  by  the  feudal  church. 


CLASS  SYSTEMS  OF   MORALITY  37 

Notwithstanding  the  sanguinary  persecutions 
under  which  the  early  Christians  had  suffered, 
Roman  ferocity  proved  powerless  to  stem  the 
advance  of  their  seditious  doctrines.  By  the 
time  of  Constantine  it  was  plain  that  a  compro- 
mise must  be  effected,  or  the  "kingdom  of  God." 
that  marvelous  Utopia  of  brotherhood,  purity  and 
peace  which  the  ecstatic  vision  of  the  saints  had 
pictured  as  replacing  the  welter  of  cruelty  and 
licentiousness  which  enveloped  them,  would  be 
dangerously  near  realization.  Diplomatic  cun- 
ning was  called  in  to  accomplish  what  mere  blood- 
thirstiness  had  failed  to  do,  Christianity  was 
made  the  state  religion,  the  church  became  the 
pensioner  of  the  civil  authority,  and  in  return 
elected  to  forego  its  revolutionary  character,  to 
abandon  its  ideals  of  social  regeneration,  and  to 
become  a  subservient  prop  to  the  imperial  power. 
Scarcely  had  this  compromise  been  reached, 
however,  when  the  entire  Roman  polity,  save  in 
the  extreme  east  of  Europe,  was  whelmed  and 
lost  in  the  chaotic  surge  of  barbarian  invasion. 
In  this  crisis  the  church  exhibited  a  fortitude, 
strength  and  mastery  of  events  unparalleled  in 
history.  By  a  wonderful  missionary  effort  it 
subdued  to  its  own  spiritual  sway  these  new 
masters  of  the  world.  If  the  barbarians  con- 
quered Rome,  it  was  only  a  matter  of  time  until 


38  PURITANISM 

Rome  in  turn  conquered  the  barbarians.  And  by 
virtue  of  its  triumph  the  church  retained  the 
place  given  it  by  Constantine,  that  of  a  state 
religion.  Nay,  more,  it  wove  itself  into  the 
very  warp  and  woof  of  the  new  feudal  society. 
Its  graded  hierarchy  was  a  replica  of  the  suc- 
cessive ranks  of  the  feudal  aristocracy.  Its  fan- 
tastically splendid  and  imposing  services  were 
but  a  portion  of  that  general  ceremonial  observ- 
ance which  adorned  the  life  of  the  middle  ages. 
In  its  hands  were  held  from  a  third  to  a  half 
of  the  lands  of  Western  Europe.  Of  all  feuda- 
tories it  was  the  richest,  the  most  powerful,  the 
most  arrogant. 

But  this  prestige  was  not  gained  by  the  church 
without  a  full  complement  of  service  rendered. 
If  the  religious  establishment  enjoyed  exception- 
al wealth  and  privilege,  it  was  because  it  was  in 
a  position  to  lend  exceptional  assistance  to  the 
proprietary  class.  With  the  relaxing  of  the 
rigors  of  the  slave  relation,  and  the  attainment  of 
a  measure  of  private  right  by  the  working  class, 
the  continued  coercion  of  labor  by  the  crude 
methods  of  sheer  physical  brutality  was  no  long- 
er feasible.  For  forcible  physical  bondage  must 
be  substituted  the  less  tangible,  yet  none  the 
less  effective,  bondage  of  superstitious  terrors; 
for  the  shackle  and  the  whip,  the  awful  dread  of 


CLASS  SYSTEMS  OF  MORALITY  39 

uncotnprehended  evil,  the  horror  of  ghostly 
doom.  To  accomplish  this  became  the  peculiar 
office  of  the  church.  Its  proletarian  traditions 
still  endeared  it  to  the  workers  in  Southern 
Europe,  while  its  communistic  reminiscences 
gave  it  a  ready  and  trustful  acceptance  among 
the  serfs  of  the  North.  Its  hold  upon  the  work- 
ing class  was  consequently  powerful.  Moreover, 
the  near  remove  of  barbarian  culture  made  the 
priestly  traffic  in  superstition  exceptionally  safe 
and  easy.  Religion  and  morality,  therefore, 
came  to  have  significance  not  merely  for  the  pro- 
prietors, but  for  the  laborers  as  well.  The  serfs 
were  received  into  the  church — the  poor  had,  in- 
deed, the  gospel  preached  to  them,  but  to  what 
an  end !  Morality  now  discharged  a  double  func- 
tion of  service  to  the  proprietors,  first,  by  incul- 
cating amongst  themselves  those  virtues  which 
buttressed  the  existing  order,  second,  by  persuad- 
ing the  workers  to  submit  tamely  to  the  exploita- 
tion and  servitude  which  supported  the  social 
fabric.  For  this  latter  purpose,  a  whole  new 
series  of  virtues  was  created,  specially  adapted 
to  the  workers,  such  as  humility,  reverence, 
obedience,  patience,  gratitude,  meekness,  and, 
above  all,  contentment,  which  has  always  been 
in  the  eyes  of  the  proprietors,  the  crowning  vir- 
tue of  the  slave.  Failure  to  practice  these  vir> 


40  PURITANISM 

tues  brought  upon  the  devoted  head  of  the  recal- 
citrant serf  the  priestly  anathema  with  all  its 
ghostly  train  of  imagined  horrors,  besides  the 
very  real  horror  of  complete  ostracism,  while  for 
the  observance  of  the  same  the  church  held  out 
a  mythical  reward  in  that  promised  "kingdom  of 
God,"  the  locale  of  which  had  been  cleverly 
shifted  from  this  world  to  the  next.  Finally,  the 
church  afforded  a  way  of  escape  to  those  more 
able  amongst  the  workers  in  whom  an  enforced 
servitude  would  surely  have  bred  rebellion.  In 
return  for  vows  of  celibacy,  and  an  undivided 
loyalty  to  the  church,  that  institution  gave  to 
these  the  opportunity  to  achieve  within  its  own 
hierarchy  the  power,  place  and  luxury  which 
men  of  exceptional  talents  have  always  demand- 
ed, but  which,  through  the  caste  distinctions  of 
feudalism,  were  reserved  in  the  course  of  secular 
affairs  for  the  nobility  alone.  It  is  doubtful  if 
this  last  named  service  of  the  church  to  feudal- 
ism has  ever  been  fully  appreciated,  though  any 
class  system,  in  order  to  insure  its  permanence, 
must  provide  in  some  way  a  vent  of  this  kind, 
else  the  disaffection  of  the  natural  leaders  of  the 
laboring  mass  will  soon  engender  insurrection. 

In  short,  the  church  was  the  indispensable  ce- 
ment which  held  feudal  society  together.  It  fur- 
nished the  intellectual  sustenance,  the  moral  sua- 


CLASS  SYSTEMS  OF  MORALITY  41 

sion  and  stimulus,  upon  which  the  system  drew 
for  nurture  and  strength.  Never  before  or  since 
have  religion  and  morality  discharged  such  im- 
portant social  functions,  and,  it  may  be  added, 
never  before  or  since  has  any  religion  proven 
so  utterly  false  to  its  pristine  purposes  and  ideals. 
True,  those  purposes  and  ideals  were  ever  impos- 
sible dreams,  and  whatever  practical  validity  they 
may  have  originally  had  was  lost  in  the  barbarian 
conquest.  But  that  the  gospel  of  the  Nazarene 
Carpenter  should  have  become  the  chief  sustain- 
ing power  of  a  class  system  of  exploitation  is 
surely  the  greatest  marvel,  as  it  is  the  supremest 
irony,  of  history.  Yet  the  proletarian,  commu- 
nistic and  revolutionary  traditions  of  the  Chris- 
tian faith  were  never  entirely  lost.  They  were 
continued  through  the  middle  ages  by  the  Wal- 
denses,  the  Anabaptists,  the  Lollards,  and  similar 
dissenting  sects,  and  blossomed  with  renewed 
vigor  in  the  Reformation  and  in  the  bourgeois 
political  revolution  which  followed,  reaching  their 
full  fruition  in  the  international  socialist  move- 
ment of  today  which  is  historically,  as  it  is 
sympathetically,  the  true  descendant  of  the  primi- 
tive church. 


CHAPTER  III 


The  feudal  system  was  essentially  rural,  being 
grounded  upon  the  tillage  of  the  soil.  Its  pe- 
culiar form  of  property  was  real  estate,  held  in 
feudal  tenure.  Its  characteristic  industry  was 
agriculture,  its  form  of  exploitation,  rent,  its  or- 
ganization, military.  In  the  medieval  cities  a 
new  form  of  property — born  of  the  feeble  com- 
merce and  manufacture  of  the  times  and  con- 
sisting chiefly  of  money  and  merchandise,  the 
beginnings  of  modern  "capital" — was  gradually 
creating  a  new  proprietary  class  having  interests 
widely  at  variance  from  those  of  the  feudal  aris- 
tocracy. Here  the  form  of  social  organization 
was  no  longer  military,  but  commercial  and  in- 
dustrial. The  form  of  exploitation  was  interest 
on  loans  (the  medieval  "usury"),  and  profits 
arising  from  manufacture  and  trade.  The  new 
industrial  system  did  not  center  in  the  relation 
of  lord  and  serf,  but,  evolving  out  of  the  con- 
nection between  apprentices  and  wandering  jour- 
neymen on  the  one  hand  and  master  mechanics 
on  the  other,  developed  into  the  freer  and  more 
flexible  wage  system  of  today. 
42 


THE   ORIGIN    OF   PURITANISM  43 

As  the  growth  of  the  new  system  exposed  its 
fundamental  characteristics  and  gave  it  definite- 
ness  of  form  and  outline,  it  became  evident  that 
a  relentless  and  dire  conflict  must  take  place  be- 
tween the  two  schemes  of  social  organization. 
Premonitions  of  this  struggle  were  found  in  the 
persecutions  of  the  Jews,  who  were  the  pioneers 
of  the  nascent  capitalism,  by  the  feudal  nobles. 
The  thin  disguise  of  religious  animosities  is  not 
sufficient  to  conceal  the  true  nature  of  these  per- 
secutions as  the  first  faint  mutterings  of  those 
terrific  tempests  of  war  and  revolution  which  for 
centuries  were  to  demonstrate  the  irreconcilable 
antagonism  between  the  old  order  and  the  new. 
In  this  long  period  of  bitter  strife,  the  commer- 
cial or  trading  class,  the  bourgeoisie,  necessarily 
assumed  the  role  of  revolutionist,  and,  like  all 
revolutionary  cults  nursed  inspiration  from  noble 
ideals  of  social  reconstruction.  But  the  particu- 
lar and  peculiar  ideal  in  the  name  of  which  the 
bourgeoisie  fought,  and  enticed  the  working  class 
to  fight,  in  its  repeated  onslaughts  upon  the 
feudal  polity,  was  that  of  "Liberty,"  to  the  evolu- 
tion of  which  we  may  devote  a  moment's  space. 

Commerce  and  industry  are  carried  on  with 
reference  to  an  ever  shifting,  changing  market. 
Hence  the  organization  of  business  and  manu- 
facture must  be  pliable,  capable  of  quick  expan- 


44  PURITANISM 

sion  or  contraction  to  meet  the  opportunities  of 
the  moment,  the  exigencies  of  varying  demand. 
A  fixed  and  immobile  relation  between  proprie- 
tor and  worker,  a  changeless  status  such  as 
exists  in  chattel  slavery  or  serfdom,  is  manifest- 
ly impossible  here.  On  the  contrary,  the  em- 
ployer must  be  free  to  assume  or  discontinue  his 
relation  to  the  worker,  to  hire  or  discharge,  as 
the  circumstances  of  his  business  may  require. 
For  the  worker,  this  meant  the  novel  boon  of 
personal  liberty.  He  was  no  longer  the  chattel 
of  a  master  or  a  portion  of  the  live  stock  at- 
tached to  the  soil.  He  gained  the  first  requisite 
of  manhood,  independence  of  movement.  He 
was  no  longer  condemned  by  birth  to  a  status  of 
servility,  but  could  now  voluntarily  assume  serv- 
ility through  the  medium  of  a  free  contract.  He 
could  as  yet  know  nothing  of  that  subtle  eco- 
nomic coercion,  growing  out  of  his  exclusion 
from  direct  and  unhampered  access  to  the  means 
of  production,  which,  under  the  guise  of  eco- 
nomic necessity,  formless,  intangible,  yet  inexor- 
able, was  to  force  him  implacably  into  this  "free 
contract"  and  hold  him  beyond  escape  in  the 
bondage  of  the  new  servitude.  Nor  could  he  as 
yet  realize  that,  despite  his  new-found  liberty, 
he  was  still  the  patient  subject  of  exploitation, 
the  lean  source  of  that  profit,  representing  the 


THE   ORIGIN   OF   PURITANISM  45 

difference  between  what  he  produced  and  what 
he  got,  which  was  to  fill  to  repletion  the  cof- 
fers of  the  trading  class.  Moreover,  the  new 
industries  required  skilled,  that  is,  educated  and 
intelligent  workers,  thereby  opening  to  the  work- 
er the  doors  of  intellectual  development,  while 
personal  liberty  carried  with  it  the  hope  that  by 
practicing  frugality,  that  is,  by  living  below  the 
normal  subsistence  line,  the  worker  might  ac- 
cumulate a  capital  of  his  own  and  so  pass  from 
the  laboring  to  the  proprietary  class.  For  the 
feudal  serf,  therefore,  the  new  industrialism 
meant  a  distinct  gain  both  in  personal  freedom 
and  intellectual  enfranchisement,  a  gain  which 
even  the  fathomless  ocean  of  degrading  poverty 
and  social  misery  upon  the  edge  of  which  he 
stood,  could  never  quite  offset. 

The  long  path  of  rebellion  and  revolution 
which  lay  before  the  bourgeoisie  before  it  could 
break  the  power  of  the  feudal  nobility,  achieve 
the  control  of  governments,  and  complete  the 
remodeling  of  society,  was  first  entered  upon 
within  the  confines  of  that  supreme  bulwark  of 
feudalism,  the  Roman  church.  This  wonderful 
institution,  fastened  like  a  gigantic  leech  upon 
the  medieval  world,  and  grown  inexpressibly 
insolent,  greedy  and  corrupt,  was  already  lead- 
ing the  feudal  nobility  to  consider  whether  the 


46  PURITANISM 

services  of  intellectual  retainers  might  not,  after 
all,  be  purchased  at  too  dear  a  cost.  Indeed, 
the  enormous  drain  upon  the  economic  resources 
of  Northern  Europe  which  the  maintenance  of 
the  institution  involved  was  making  it  insupport- 
able to  all  classes  alike.  For  the  new  trading 
and  manufacturing  class,  besides,  whose  novel 
industries  required  the  aid  of  the  natural  sci- 
ences to  their  successful  prosecution  and  for 
whom,  therefore,  free  intellectual  inquiry  and 
untrammeled  scientific  investigation  were  indis- 
pensable, the  bigoted  restraints  which  priestly 
superstition  placed  upon  independent  intellectual 
activity  were  economically  fatal.  In  the  actual 
assault  upon  the  church,  it  became  necessary 
both  to  invalidate  its  central  dogmas,  and  in  so 
doing  to  establish  liberty  of  critical  inquiry  (lib- 
erty of  thought),  and  to  discard  the  ministrations 
of  the  eclesiastical  hierarchy  as  mediators  be- 
tween the  individual  soul  and  God,  thus  pro- 
claiming liberty  of  conscience.  Again,  there  were 
imposed  by  feudal  laws  various  taxes,  imposts, 
regulations  and  restrictions  upon  industry,  trade 
and  banking,  relief  from  which  embodied  for  the 
trading  class,  in  a  very  real  and  practical  form, 
the  notion  of  liberty.  Finally,  in  its  further 
struggles  to  break  the  grasp  of  the  feudal  nobil- 
ity upon  the  powers  of  government  and  compel 


THE   ORIGIN    OF    PURITANISM  47 

recognition  for  itself  in  civil  affairs,  the  trading 
class  was  compelled  to  adopt  the  slogans  of 
political  liberty  and  popular  government.  From 
all  these  circumstances  arose,  for  the  bourgeoisie, 
the  idea  of  Liberty  as  an  abstract  conception,  a 
vague  yet  potent  and  enrapturing  ideal,  which 
finds  its  reductio  ad  absurdum  in  the  anarchistic 
philosophies  of  our  own  time.  But  this  splen- 
did, if  thoroughly  negative,  ideal  of  Liberty,  was, 
after  all,  strictly  a  class  ideal.  For  the  bour- 
geoisie it  meant,  primarily,  freedom  of  trade,  that 
sacred  right  of  buying  in  the  cheapest  and  selling 
in  the  dearest  market.  Next,  freedom  of  scien- 
tific inquiry  so  that  the  new  industrialism  might 
be  fully  developed.  And,  lastly,  freedom  from 
feudal  domination  in  church  and  state — freedom 
of  conscience,  and  such  participation  in  govern- 
ment as  a  proprietary  class  has  the  right  to  de- 
mand. Here  the  conception  of  Liberty  stopped 
short.  The  freedom  from  serfdom  held  out  to 
the  workers  was  essentially  a  delusion,  a  sharp 
sundering  of  the  serf  from  his  economic  base  in 
his  attachment  to  the  soil  and  a  casting  of  him 
loose  upon  the  swirling  currents  of  proletarian 
vagabondage  in  the  glorious  liberty  to  work  for 
the  trading  class  on  the  terms  it  might  dictate,  or 
else  to  starve  in  the  streets.  Nor  had  the  bour- 
geoisie any  intention  of  permitting  the  working 


48  PURITANISM 

class  to  share  in  the  powers  of  government. 
Residential  educational  and  property  restrictions 
upon  the  right  of  suffrage,  systematic  deception 
and  misleading  of  the  popular  mind,  and  whole- 
sale bribery  of  public  officials,  were  the  means 
resorted  to  to  prevent  political  liberty  reaching 
the  proletariat,  which  had  borne  the  brunt  of 
the  battle  for  its  acquisition.  To  the  hue  and 
cry  of  the  trading  class  after  "Liberty,"  the 
French  proletariat,  which  for  a  brief  period 
gained  a  real  ascendency  during  the  French  Revo- 
lution, added  the  true  proletarian  rallying  cries 
of  "Equality"  and  "Fraternity,"  greatly  to  the 
embarrassment  of  the  trading  class,  which  still 
experiences  a  feeling  of  consternation  at  their 
reiteration. 

In  every  historic  epoch,  the  dominant  class 
rises  to  its  place  of  power  because  of  some  vast 
and  imperative  social  work  which  it  is  the  des- 
tiny of  that  class  to  accomplish.  Thus,  the  slave- 
holders of  antiquity  established  an  ordered  and 
permanent  society,  created  the  territorial  state, 
and  began  that  accumulation  of  wealth  which, 
as  the  sine  qua  non  of  leisure  and  culture,  is  the 
indispensable  basis  of  human  progress.  After 
the  "barbarian  conquest,  the  feudal  aristocracy 
performed,  under  far  different  circumstances,  a 
like  service  for  the  whole  of  Europe.  In  both 


THE   ORIGIN    OF   PURITANISM  49 

instances,  the  transition  was  from  a  wandering, 
aimless  and  relatively  unprogressive  barbarism  to 
a  settled,  established  and  progressive  social  order. 
Similarly,  looking  backward  through  the  vista  of 
centuries,  we  now  perceive  that  the  supreme 
business,  the  economic  function,  the  "historic 
mission,"  of  the  bourgeoisie  has  been  the  accumu- 
lation of  capital,  the  heaping  together  of  the  im- 
mense stores  of  wealth  which  presage  and  make 
possible  the  final  triumph  of  man  over  his  nat- 
ural environment,  the  ultimate  conquest  of  mat- 
ter by  intelligence.  Not  that  the  members  of 
the  trading  class  had  in  themselves  any  under- 
standing of  the  social  significance  of  their  labors 
or  their  regnancy.  Personally,  they  were  inspired 
by  no  loftier  motive  than  the  commonplace  greed 
of  mankind.  Yet  this  greed,  in  the  hidden 
course  of  human  evolution,  worked  to  an  imper- 
sonal and  cosmic  end,  which  at  once  necessitated 
and  justifies  the  capitalistic  era. 

As  the  historic  mission  of  the  bourgeoisie  was 
the  accumulation  of  capital,  so  all  its  morality 
sprang  from  and  bore  upon  this  aim.  The  pro- 
found change  in  the  social  structure  from  a  mili- 
tary to  an  industrial  basis,  of  course  involved 
the  creation  of  an  entirely  new  system  of  morals ; 
but  the  key  to  the  new  system  lies  in  the  eco- 
nomic function  of  accumulation  which  the  trad- 


50  PURITANISM 

ing  class  was  to  discharge.  The  military  virtues 
of  the  old  regime,  accordingly,  had  little  or  no 
meaning  for  the  budding  capitalists.  In  place  of 
warlike  courage  and  desire  for  military  glory, 
they  were  timid  and  frankly  non-resistant — ex- 
cept, indeed,  where  their  fierce  conflicts  with  the 
nobility  stimulated  in  them  a  passing  military 
ardor.  The  old  feudal  conception  of  honor, 
which  was  in  reality  a  fine  recognition  of  the 
obligation  imposed  by  another's  confidence,  de- 
generated with  the  bourgeoisie  into  a  mere  fidel- 
ity in  the  payment  of  commercial  debts.  In 
place  of  loyalty  to  the  sovereign,  the  peculiar 
position  in  which  the  trading  class  found  itself 
led  it  to  extol  revolution.  In  place  of  obedience, 
came  a  spirit  of  personal  independence  growing 
out  of  and  fostered  by  private,  disconnected  and 
competitive  business  interests.  In  place  of  truth 
telling,  came  the  trickery  and  chicanery  of  trade. 
Pride  of  family  the  bourgeoise  had  not,  and  so 
affected  humility.  Courtesy  and  chivalry  were 
lost  upon  him.  On  the  other  hand,  a  long  series 
of  purely  economic  virtues,  each  and  all  wholly 
calculated  to  further  the  general  class  business  of 
accumulation,  sprang  into  being.  Such  were  in- 
dustry, prudence,  thrift,  frugality,  temperance, 
simplicity,  early  rising  and  the  like — a  wonderful 
exposition  and  summary  of  which  may  be  found 


THE   ORIGIN   OF   PURITANISM  51 

in  the  essays  of  Benjamin  Franklin.  Idleness 
and  dissipation,  which  hindered  personal  accumu- 
lation, became  the  cardinal  vices.  The  very  term 
"dissipation"  suggests  the  scattering  of  worldly 
goods.  Sports  and  amusements,  involving  a 
waste  of  time  which  might  have  been  spent  in 
labor  and  of  money  which  might  have  been 
hoarded,  were  necessarily  condemned.  An  illus- 
tration of  the  new  moral  temper  is  found  in  the 
changed  attitude  towards  the  practice  of  gam- 
bling. For  the  feudal  aristocracy  gambling  pos- 
sessed no  especial  social  or  class  significance,  and 
so  was  regarded  as  merely  a  harmless  diversion. 
With  the  trading  class,  however,  gambling  repre- 
sented the  hazarding  and  scattering  of  accumula- 
tions without  any  compensatory  prospect  of 
creating  fresh  revenue  for  the  class,  that  is,  an 
"unproductive"  hazard,  and  so,  being  perceived 
to  be  a  source  of  class  detriment,  was  promptly 
branded  as  a  vice.  Dueling,  drunkenness,  lech- 
ery, all  the  enervating  and  profligate  pursuits  into 
the  morass  of  which  the  decadent  nobility  had 
fallen,  became  likewise  the  very  sum  of  evil  to 
the  grim  money-grubbers  now  aspiring  to  civil 
and  political  dominance. 

Moreover,  the  economic  virtues  which  ex- 
pressed the  class  interest  of  the  bourgeoisie  when 
practiced  amongst  themselves,  equally  embodied 


52  PURITANISM 

that  same  class  interest  when  applied  to  the 
wage  worker.  For  the  wage  worker  who  prac- 
ticed them,  who  was  industrious,  frugal,  thrifty, 
temperate  and  the  rest,  could  obviously  live  on  a 
less  wage  than  his  more  extravagant  and  irre- 
sponsible fellow,  while  at  the  same  time  yielding 
a  larger  product  from  his  labor,  and  so  became  a 
much  better  subject  of  exploitation  than  if  he 
failed  in  economic  virtues.  The  new  morality 
was  accordingly  preached  to  all  alike.  But  the 
virtues  specially  devised  by  the  feudal  church 
for  the  discipline  of  the  working  class  were  far 
too  valuable  to  be  thrown  away;  and  so,  with 
respect  to  the  workers,  the  bourgeoisie  still  in- 
sisted on  humility,  obedience,  respect  for  one's 
"betters,"  gratitude,  patience,  meekness,  and, 
above  all,  contentment,  that  most  pleasing  and 
reassuring  to  the  masters  of  all  the  servile  vir- 
tues. Even  poverty  itself,  of  which  the  new  sys- 
tem was  to  create  so  much,  was  sublimated  by 
the  more  ardent  intellectual  servitors  of  the  ris- 
ing capitalist  class  into  a  sort  of  virtue,  to  be 
practiced,  however,  by  the  workers  only.  So, 
too,  was  preserved  from  the  feudal  faith  the  ful- 
some promise  of  an  enticing  reward  beyond  the 
grave,  consisting  of  pearly  gates  and  golden 
streets  and  idleness  and  other  luxuries,  for  those 
workers  who  patiently  submitted  to  the  depriva- 


THE   ORIGIN    OF    PURITANISM  53 

tion  of  the  necessities  of  this  present  life.  The 
legal  fictions  of  political  equality  and  freedom  of 
contract  also  acted  as  further  anodynes  sooth- 
ing the  sacrifice  of  the  workers,  as  well  as  dis- 
guising the  fundamental  class  division  of  capi- 
talist society  springing  from  the  private  owner- 
ship of  the  means  of  production.  The  new  soci- 
ety, therefore,  resolved  itself  into  a  general  dis- 
cipline of  penury  and  toil,  enlivened  by  no  lighter 
relaxation  than  the  grim  ecstasies  of  religious 
devotion  or  the  fury  of  revolutionary  strife. 

In  complete  contrast  to  the  new  habit  of  life, 
had  been  the  life  of  the  middle  ages.  As  in  all 
barbarian  or  semi-barbarian  epochs,  existence  in 
medieval  times,  while  primitive  and  squalid,  was 
brilliant  with  color  and  vibrant  with  elemental 
impulse.  It  was  an  age  of  romance  and  legend, 
flashing  with  pageantry,  gorgeous  with  stately 
ceremonial,  weird  with  the  vagaries  of  undisci- 
plined imagination,  responsive  with  childlike  eag- 
erness to  all  natural  emotion.  The  principal  in- 
dustry of  the  era  was  agriculture,  which  admitted 
of  much  leisure  to  be  occupied  either  in  martial 
adventurings,  or  in  holidays  and  fetes  to  which 
the  church,  with  customary  adroitness,  supplied 
an  ostensibly  religious  foundation.  Poverty  and 
misery  there  were,  indeed,  in  plenty,  to  say  noth- 
ing of  a  picturesque  brutality ;  but  it  was  the  pov- 


54  PURITANISM 

erty  of  simple  want,  the  misery  of  ignorance,  not, 
as  in  later  times,  the  poverty  resulting  from  the 
automatic  deprivation  of  an  available  abundance, 
the  calculated  misery  of  scientific  exploitation, 
the  impersonal  and  monotonous  brutality  of  sys- 
tematized greed.  .  The  new  industries  which  fos- 
tered, and  in  turn  were  fostered  by,  the  trading 
class,  were  far  more  insistent  in  their  demands 
upon  the  time  and  strength  of  those  engaged  in 
them  than  were  the  agricultural  and  military  pur- 
suits of  the  old  regime,  while  the  tyrannical 
necessity  of  accumulation  under  which  the  bour- 
geoisie labored  precluded  any  possibilities  of 
leisure,  amusement  or  recreation.  Poverty  may 
be  quite  consistent  with  idleness,  with  pageantry 
and  games,  but  the  conquest  of  poverty  must  be 
begun  in  a  drab  and  industrious  parsimony.  Nu- 
merous holidays,  therefore,  were  directly  anti- 
thetical to  the  Puritan  scheme  of  existence,  and 
were  incontinently  abolished, — all  but  the  Puri- 
tan sabbath.  This  most  peculiar  and  chaarac- 
teristic  feature  of  the  Puritan  polity  deserves 
some  special  discussion.  With  its  repudiation  of 
ecclesiastical  authority,  it  became  necessary  for 
Puritanism  to  find  a  substitute  source  of  author- 
ity which  could  be  made  to  sanction  its  own 
doctrine,  ethics  and  churchly  organization.  It 
found  this  in  the  bible,  but  newly  made  available 


THE    ORIGIN    OF    PURITANISM  55 

to  the  commonality  by  translations  into  modern 
speech  from  the  original  texts.  The  Roman 
church  could  not  well  question  the  authority  of 
the  scriptures,  since  for  it  also  the  bible  was  a 
holy  book,  and  so  was  limited  to  the  rather  in- 
effectual plea  that  the  interpretation  of  the  sa- 
cred text  was  its  own  prerogative ;  while  for 
the  Puritan  the  bible  became,  in  the  hands  of 
skillful  and  fanatical  exegetes,  a  weapon  of  terri- 
ble power  against  the  accepted  faith.  In  the 
Old  Testament  the  Puritans  discovered  the  in- 
stitution of  the  Jewish  sabbath,  which  they  pro- 
ceeded to  mold,  in  accordance  with  their  own 
purposes,  into  a  celebration  which  would  have 
sufficiently  amazed  the  tribesmen  of  Israel.  A 
weekly  rest  day  was,  in  fact,  necessary  for  two 
reasons.  First,  because  absolutely  unremitting 
toil  was  too  much  even  for  the  Puritan  mind  to 
contemplate  with  equanimity.  Second,  because 
it  furnished  an  opportunity,  indispensable  in  the 
position  of  conflict  and  peril  in  which  the  bour- 
geoisie was  placed,  for  class  mobilization,  the 
discussion  of  class  interests,  the  rousing  of  class 
enthusiasm,  the  perfecting  of  class  organization. 
For  the  medieval  church,  Sunday  had  been  a 
fete  day  not  materially  different  from  any 
saint's  day  or  holiday,  to  be  spent,  after  religious 
services  had  been  duly  observed,  in  feasting, 


56  PURITANISM 

games,  good  fellowship  and  jollity.  For  the 
Puritans  it  became  a  rest  day  on  which  even 
rest  was  pursued  strictly  as  a  business.  All 
recreations  and  diversions  which  might  encour- 
age idleness  or  profligacy  were  rigorously  sup- 
pressed as  sinful  (profanation  of  the  Sabbath) 
until  even  toil  itself  assumed  the  aspect  of  a 
boon.  But,  more,  as  a  day  consecrated  to  the 
promotion  of  class  interests,  Sunday  become  also 
the  period  on  which  the  sectaries  gathered  to- 
gether for  counsel  and  admonition  at  the  hands 
of  their  leaders,  administered  through  endless 
sermons,  while  the  emotional  loyalty  and  devo- 
tion of  the  assemblage  were  aroused  by  sonorous 
prayers  and  choruses  of  hymns.  Indeed,  for  the 
Puritans,  religious  fervor  afforded  that  stimulus 
to  class  solidarity  which  under  previous  systems 
had  been  inspired  by  the  virtue  of  patriotism  or 
loyalty  to  the  king.  At  these  conventicles,  more- 
over, the  principles  of  Puritan  morality  were 
expounded,  while  personal  intimacy  enabled  the 
members  to  keep  watch  over  one  another's  com- 
pliance with  them.  Thus  the  Puritan  Sabbath 
was,  on  the  whole,  invested  with  a  uniquely  de- 
pressing and  devitalizing  sanctity,  the  like  of 
which  no  religious  festival  had  ever  before 
known.  It  was  inevitable,  indeed,  that  the  hol- 
iday of  a  still  relatively  impoverished  trading 


THE   ORIGIN    OF    PURITANISM  57 

class,  bent  upon  accumulation,  should  be  a 
pinched  and  sober  affair,  but  the  rayless  gloom 
of  the  Puritan  sabbath  is  fully  explicable  only 
in  view  of  the  fierce  antagonism  between  bour- 
geoisie and  nobility,  and,  perhaps,  the  sharp 
contrast  which  Puritanism  felt  compelled  to  pre- 
sent to  the  florid  license  of  the  elder  morality. 

The  characteristic  form  of  property  of  the 
bourgeoisie  was  personalty,  which  could  be 
manufactured,  traded  in,  and  made  the  reposi- 
tary  of  profits.  Unlike  the  landed  estates  of 
the  feudal  nobility,  this  more  mobile  form  of 
property  was  not  especially  adapted  to  trans- 
mission by  inheritance  since  the  identity  of  its 
particular  items  was  constantly  shifting.  More- 
over, the  capabilities  of  capitalistic  industry  in 
piling  up  wealth  were  so  great  that  primogeni- 
ture, and  even  a  closely  restricted  progeny,  were 
no  longer  necessary  to  the  preservation  of  class 
dominance  from  one  generation  to  another. 
There  was  no  economic  reason,  therefore,  for 
maintaining  the  irrefragable  character  of  the 
feudal  marriage.  Accordingly,  the  bourgeoisie 
introduced  and  defended  the  right  of  divorce, 
a  privilege  which  has  been  more  and  more  freely 
applied  as  the  gigantic  accumulations  of  latter- 
day  capitalism  have  made  the  institution  of  mar- 
riage less  and  less  vital  to  the  issue  of  class 


58  PURITANISM 

preservation.  Certain  limited  recognition  even 
began  to  be  bestowed  upon  illegitimates.  The 
subsequent  marriage  of  their  parents  was  al- 
lowed, as  under  the  Roman  law  which  was 
formulated  during  the  era  of  chattel  slavery,  to 
legitimize  them.  They  were  permitted  to  in- 
herit from  the  mother,  and  even  from  the  father 
if  formally  recognized  by  him  in  his  lifetime. 
Undoubtedly  the  Puritan  advocacy  of  divorce 
was  stimulated,  however,  by  the  attitude  of  op- 
position towards  feudalism  in  which  the  trading 
class  was  placed.  Indissoluble  marriage  was 
vital  to  feudalism — lay,  indeed,  at  the  foundation 
of  the  system — and  hence  the  marriage  institu- 
tion constituted  a  convenient  point  of  attack  by 
the  new  enemies  of  the  feudal  order.  And  it  is  a 
curious  and  instructive  commentary  upon  the 
class  character  of  modern  systems  of  morality, 
that  the  present-day  outcry  against  the  divorce 
"evil"  proceeds  chiefly  from  the  ritualistic 
churches,  which  are  themselves  the  anachronistic 
survivals  of  the  feudal  system.  But  while  prac- 
ticing and  defending  the  right  of  divorce  and, 
later,  writing  it  broadly  in  its  laws,  the  bour- 
geoisie, no  more  than  any  other  proprietary 
class,  could  afford  to  dispense  with  the  institu- 
tion of  marriage,  that  is,  with  the  civil  control 
of  the  sex  relation.  Nor  could  it,  any  more  than 


THE   ORIGIN    OF    PURITANISM  59 

any  other  proprietary  class,  tolerate  the  institu- 
tion in  anything  else  than  its  monogamous  form. 
The  same  considerations  which  operated  to  in- 
troduce monogamy  originally,  namely,  the  neces- 
sity of  having  a  restricted  and  definitely  ascer- 
tained progency  to  which  could  be  transmitted 
proprietary  rights  and  privileges,  were  still  con- 
trolling, and  monogamy,  with  its  concomitant 
virtue  of  female  chastity,  remained,  as  before, 
the  established  form  of  the  marriage  relation, 
with  the  right  of  divorce,  under  special  circum- 
stances, added  to  it. 

But  while  the  rigor  of  the  marriage  institu- 
tion was  thus  softened,  powerful  economic  mo- 
tives conspired  to  develop  the  entirely  novel 
virtue  of  male  chastity.  Under  feudalism,  the 
attitude  of  the  member  of  the  proprietary  class 
towards  women  of  his  own  class  was  one  of 
chivalry,  courtesy  and  respect;  but  towards 
women  of  other  classes,  particularly  of  the 
working  class,  was  one  of  almost  as  unbridled  li- 
cense as  that  of  the  master  towards  the  chattel 
slave.  But  the  necessities  of  accumulation  com- 
pelled Puritanism  to  utterly  reprobate  all  forms 
of  vice  and  dissipation  (except  such  as  held 
possibilities  of  profit),  including  in  a  marked 
degree  licentiousness,  since  few  forms  of  dissi- 
pation are  economically  more  extravagant  or 


60  PURITANISM 

inimical  to  accumulation  than  this.  Hence  arose 
the  virtue  of  male  chastity,  since  the  chaste  man 
conserved  by  so  much  more  his  worldly  goods. 
The  chastity  of  the  male,  however,  could  never 
attain  the  degree  of  moral  obligation  which  en- 
forced the  chastity  of  the  female,  since  the  for- 
mer could  never  play  so  important  a  part  in  the 
business  of  class  preservation.  Thus  came  into 
being  that  much  criticized  but  inescapable  "dou- 
ble standard  of  morality,"  which  has  so  per- 
plexed the  later  Puritan  moralists  of  the  gentler 
sex.  With  the  marvelous  heaping  up  of  wealth 
under  full  grown  capitalism  the  virtue  of  male 
chastity,  as  might  be  expected,  has  lost  much  of 
its  obligation,  though  the  economic  dependence 
of  women  upon  men  has  enabled  the  latter  to 
enforce  the  more  important  virtue  of  female 
chastity  in  undiminished  rigor.  And  it  is  this 
same  economic  compulsion  exercised  by  the  male 
over  the  female,  which,  curiously  enough,  in 
another  connection  and  upon  the  sinister  side  of 
bourgeois  life,  is  used  to  coerce  women  to  the 
vice  of  prostitution.  Woman  is,  indeed,  the 
mere  plaything  of  man's  economic  interest  or 
his  passion,  and  is  "good"  or  "bad"  according  to 
the  use  made  of  her. 

In  its  rebellion  against  the  medieval  church, 
the  bourgeoisie  did  not,  at  first,  become   irre- 


THE   ORIGIN    OF   PURITANISM  61 

ligious.  On  the  contrary,  it  founded  ecclesiasti- 
cal establishments  of  its  own — the  evangelical 
churches — and  through  them  and  the  recovered 
bible  assailed  the  elder  church  in  the  name  of 
a  higher  and  purer  religious  life.  But  the  leaven 
of  free,  critical  inquiry,  which  was  essential  to 
and  immanent  in  the  bourgeois  economy,  oper- 
ated steadily  to  impair  the  validity  of  religious 
dogma,  the  authority  of  religious  teaching,  and 
the  warrant  which  religion  had  previously  lent 
to  moral  observance.  The  bonds  of  faith  were 
constantly  weakened,  the  rewards  and  penalties 
of  the  future  life,  which  had  hitherto  enforced 
moral  conduct,  grew  shadowy  and  unreal,  and, 
losing  this  spiritual  sanction,  Puritanism  was 
obliged  more  and  more  to  turn  directly  to  public 
opinion  for  its  coercive  support.  The  sectaries 
became,  accordingly,  the  censors  of  each  other's 
private  conduct  and  personal  affairs.  A  spirit 
of  censoriousness,  of  gossipy  meddlesomeness,  ^ 
of  dictatorial  interference  with  the  personal  hab- 
its, tastes  and  concerns  of  others,  thus  came  to 
pervade  the  Puritan  atmosphere  and  to  mark 
the  true  Puritan  temper.  Moreover,  as  the  re- 
ligious sanction  relaxed  and  was  lost  to  Puritan- 
ism, strenuous  efforts  were  made  to  substitute  . 
therefor  the  legal  coercion  of  physical  force —  s\ 
to  enact  morality  into  law.  For  this,  there  was 


62  PURITANISM 

some  justification,  as  well  as  the  inspiration  of 
envy,  in  the  civil  jurisdiction  wielded  by  the 
medieval  church  and  in  the  fact  that,  through 
the  intimate  union  of  church  and  state,  the  for- 
mer had  been  wont  to  invoke  the  civil  power  for 
the  protection  of  its  privileges,  doctrines,  and 
general  spiritual  ascendency.  But  neither  the 
arrogance  nor  terror  of  the  medieval  church 
ever  mothered  such  strange  legislation  as  has 
the  centuries-old  itch  of  the  Puritan  to  bring  to 
his  moral  propaganda  the  dark  aid  of  the  jail, 
the  whipping  post  and  the  stocks.  That  it  should 
be  criminal  to  dance  on  the  village  green,  to  eat 
mince  pie  or  caress  one's  wife  on  the  sabbath, 
records,  for  Puritanism,  the  high-water  mark  of 
moral  aspiration,  achieved  in  the  period  of  its 
supremest  and  most  characteristic  efflorescence. 
With  the  decadence  of  religious  faith,  morality 
began,  too,  to  be  divorced  from  religion  in  crit- 
ical thought.  Ethics  and  dogma  were  seen  as 
separate  and  even  as  disconnected  things,  until, 
in  time,  was  produced  what  to  an  earlier  age 
would  have  seemed  an  incomprehensible  anom- 
aly, the  moral  infidel.  This  disseverance  of  faith 
and  morals  induced  the  search  for  some  new 
and  more  rational  foundation  for  moral  obliga- 
tion, the  chief  fruit  of  which  was  the  utilitarian- 
ism of  the  nineteenth  century,  the  last  word  of 


THE   ORIGIN   OF   PURITANISM  63 

bourgeois  intellectualism  on  the  subject  of  ethics. 

In  its  desire  to  secure  for  itself  a  legal  status 
and  sanction,  Puritanism  ran  counter  to  one  of 
the  most  deep-seated  traits  of  the  bourgeoisie, 
the  spirit  of  personal  independence,  always  de- 
veloped among  small  proprietors,  and  particu- 
larly nurtured  by  the  competitive  nature  of  im- 
mature capitalism.  The  endless  conflict  which 
morality,  as  the  embodiment  of  group  or  class 
interest,  must  wage  with  individual  desire,  was 
thus  intensified  for  Puritanism,  the  more  zealous 
seeking  to  coerce  by  law  while  the  more  inde- 
pendent resisted  in  the  name  of  personal  liberty. 

But  the  exercise  of  personal  independence  in 
the  realm  of  morals  was  curbed  for  the  Puritan 
by  a  quality  of  character,  the  peculiar  product  of 
the  historical  setting  and  development  of  the 
bourgeoisie,  which,  by  supplying  the  place  of 
emotional  stimulus  once  furnished  by  the  super- 
stitious fears  of  an  earlier  creed,  gave  to  the 
Puritanical  code  a  warrant  and  urgency  which 
went  far  towards  compensating  for  the  loss  of 
the  cruder  sanctions  of  faith  and  dread.  This 
peculiar  quality  was  the  Puritan  conscience. 
Fabricated  in  the  crucible  of  persecution  from 
without  and  pragmatical  criticism  from  within, 
stimulated  by  a  fervid  idealism  and  a  stern  class 
necessity,  the  Puritan  conscience  became  the 


64  PURITANISM 

finest,  and,  in  some  respects,  the  most  irrational 
element  of  Puritan  psychology.  No  more  strik- 
ing instance  can  be  found  of  the  moral  triumph 
of  class  interest  over  individual  egoism  than  the 
generation  of  this  noble  passion — the  sense  of 
duty,  the  service  of  the  right  for  the  right's 
sake,  the  burden  of  the  cause  of  righteousness  to 
be  borne,  with  no  thought  of  self,  in  defiance  of 
the  sneers  of  the  world,  the  seductions  of  the 
flesh,  the  wiles  and  torments  of  the  Arch  Fiend 
himself.  For  twelve  hundred  years,  ever  since 
the  cessation  of  the  propaganda  of  the  primitive 
church,  the  world  had  known  no  revolutionary 
impulse;  and  while  the  self-abasing  loyalty  and 
fanatical  devotion  which  nurtured  the  Puritan 
conscience  belong  equally  to  any  revolutionary 
era,  the  growth  of  this  trait  of  the  Puritan  char- 
acter must  be  regarded,  in  view  of  this  long 
lapse  of  time,  as  a  novel  development  of  human 
nature.  Nor  have  the  revolutionary  movements 
of  the  present  day  ever  adequately  recognized 
their  indebtedness  in  this  regard  to  the  Puritan 
discipline  of  life. 

Yet  while  Puritan  morality  was  thus  power- 
fully enforced  by  the  Puritan  conscience,  the 
deep  and  resistless  current  of  bourgeois  destiny, 
the  historic  mission  of  accumulation,  contrived 
in  many  and  fantastic  ways  to  set  at  naught  the 


THE    ORIGIN   OF    PURITANISM  65 

admonitions  of  the  still,  small  voice.  From  this 
resulted  that  Puritan  hypocrisy  which,  in  its 
way,  is  quite  jis  characteristic  of  the  Puri- 
tan mentality  as  is  the  Puritan  conscience. 
All  class  systems  of  morality  which  are 
used  in  restraining  or  perverting  the  natural 
egoism  of  the  workers  must  of  necessity  be 
grounded  in  hypocrisy.  But  the  business  of 
money  getting  upon  which  the  trading  class  was 
bent,  and  the  ruthless  greed  which  was  its  actu- 
ating motive,  served  to  broaden  and  intensify 
this  hypocrisy  till  it  not  only  pervaded  the  rela- 
tion of  the  trading  class  to  the  workers  but  sat- 
urated all  its  other  relations  as  well.  All  of  the 
tenets  of  Puritanism,  even  those  most  peculiar 
and  most  sternly  held,  were  subject  at  any  time 
to  modification  or  abrogation  in  furtherance  of 
the  fundamental  purpose  and  function  of  ac- 
cumulation. ThuSj  notwithstanding  its  laudation 
of  chastity  and  horrified  condemnation  of  sexual 
laxity,  it  was  reserved  for  the  bourgeoisie  to 
capitalize  the  ancient  evil  of  prostitution,  to 
transform  its  unfortunate  victims  into  true  prole- 
tarians of  vice  whose  pitiful  exploitation  could 
be  made  to  yield  luscious  revenues  to  the  trading 
class.  Puritan  hatred  of  vice  likewise  vanished 
when  Puritan  incomes  could  be  augmented  by 
forcing,  at  the  cannon's  muzzle,  the  opium  trade 


66  PURITANISM 

upon  the  Chinese.  Puritan  ideals  of  liberty  were 
incontinently  smirched,  for  the  sake  of  dollars, 
in  the  African  slave  trade.  The  commercial  in- 
tegrity of  the  Puritan  has  proven  no  substitute 
for  penal  laws  against  the  vending  of  adulterated 
and  poisonous  foods.  Nor  did  Puritan  detesta- 
tion of  the  barbarities  of  slavery  ever  extend 
to  the  even  more  ghastly  barbarities  of  child  la- 
bor, of  needless  mutilation  of  workers,  of  under- 
paid unremitting  toil  of  men  and  women,  in- 
flicted in  Puritan  mines  and  mills  and  factories 
out  of  which  flowed  the  golden  wealth  of  the 
bourgeoisie.  Of  course,  many  sincere  and  ear- 
nest Puritans  have,  as  individuals,  revolted 
against  these  apparent  inconsistencies  and  have 
sought  a  consciencious  application  of  Puritan 
principles  to  bourgeois  affairs,  even  at  the  hazard 
of  class  interests.  But  their  efforts  have  been 
ineffectual  to  mold  the  general  tenor  of  the  life 
and  habit  of  the  trading  class,  by  which,  rather 
than  by  the  conduct  of  a  protesting  minority  of 
exceptional  individuals,  must  be  determined  the 
value  which  time  and  history  will  place  upon  the 
Puritan  system. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE    DECADENCE    OF    PURITANISM 

Ever  and  always  man,  the  indolent  yet  un- 
comfortable animal,  matches  his  ingenuity  against 
the  hardships,  dangers  and  niggardliness  of  his 
surroundings  in  the  endeavor  to  gain  an  increas- 
ing amplitude  and  security  of  economic  re- 
source with  less  and  less  of  physical  exertion. 
The  principal  business  of  all  life  is  living,  and 
the  impulse  and  art  of  self-preservation  are  of 
necessity  the  mainsprings  of  all  organic  activities. 
But  the  effort  to  compass  by  intellectual  sub- 
tility  the  problems  of  environment,  to  substi- 
tute for  brute  strength  and  endurance  or  for- 
tunate accident,  the  calculated  manipulation  of 
cause  and  effect,  the  intelligent  modification  of 
adverse  conditions  in  accordance  with  the  sug- 
gestions of  reason  and  reflection,  marks  the  com- 
mencement of  that  triumph  of  mind  over  mat- 
ter which  it  is  the  destiny  of  humanity  to 
accomplish.  This  is  not  saying,  however,  that  man 
responds  to  no  other  incentive  than  the  desire 
for  material  safety  and  well-being.  While  mate- 
rial sustenance  and  satisfaction  are  perforce  the 
main  concerns  of  human  as  of  all  other  organic 
67 


68  PURITANISM 

existence,  numerous  other  motives,  such  as  love, 
anger,  revenge,  sympathy,  ambition,  curiosity, 
the  love  of  beauty,  the  love  of  adventure,  the 
instincts  of  play  and  of  workmanship,  the  sense 
of  duty,  constantly  supplement  and  in  exception- 
al instances  may  entirely  override  the  more 
basic  economic  motive.  This  is  frequently  and 
strikingly  obvious  in  cases  of  individual  con- 
duct, so  much  so  that  it  is  impossible  to  predi- 
cate with  any  satisfactory  degree  of  certainty  the 
action  of  any  single  person  upon  the  economic 
motive  alone.  And,  though  less  common,  it  is 
none  the  less  true  that  the  movements  of  man- 
kind in  the  mass  are  at  times  deflected  from 
their  true  economic  bent  by  alien  sentiments  and 
desires,  while  in  all  mass  movements  these  more 
idealistic  sentiments  are  at  least  present  to  give 
inspiration  and  sanction  to  the  carrying  out  of 
economic  ends.  But  when  all  proper  allowance 
has  been  made  for  the  operation  of  those  emo- 
tional impulses  which  are  not  concerned  with 
material  well  being,  it  yet  remains  true  that  the 
fundamental  necessity  of  getting  a  living  and  the 
overweening  desire  to  get  it  with  as  little  labor 
as  possible,  form  the  relentless  prod,  the  su- 
preme dynamic  urge,  to  human  progress,  and 
the  great  moving  and  directing  force  of  history. 
The  substitution  which  man  constantly  en- 


THE  DECADENCE  OF  PURITANISM  69 

deavors  to  make  of  intellectual  ingenuity  for 
mere  physical  labor  in  this  imperative  business 
of  getting  a  livelihood,  leads  to  the  practice  of 
scientific  discovery  and  mechanical  invention 
which  in  turn  lead  to  the  creation  of  novel  tools 
and  industrial  processes.  The  javelin  thrown 
from  the  hand  becomes  the  arrow  propelled 
from  the  bow;  the  crooked  stick  used  to  scratch 
the  earth  takes  form  as  the  plow;  the  primitive 
arts  of  spinning,  weaving,  pottery  and  later  of 
the  making  of  bronze  and  smelting  of  iron,  af- 
ford instances  of  scientific  and  mechanical 
achievements  which  illustrate  the  general  tenor 
of  economic  progress.  The  sum  of  the  indus- 
trial processes  and  mechanical  equipment  pos- 
sessed by  any  given  epoch,  constitutes  the  indus- 
trial technique  of  that  epoch;  and  the  stage  of 
advancement  reached  in  .general  industrial 
technique  determines  the  form  of  industrial  as- 
sociation into  which  men  will  enter  in  carrying 
forward  the  general  burden  of  industry.  The 
particular  industrial  association  or  relation  thus 
necessitated  by  the  existing  industrial  technique 
becomes  the  industrial  system  which  forms  the 
foundation  or  skeleton  of  the  social  organization 
of  the  age.  Thus,  at  a  given  period  in  the  devel- 
opment of  the  technique  of  industry,  specifically, 
the  point  at  which  systematic  agriculture  became 


70  PURITANISM 

established,  the  industrial  relation  naturally 
flowing  therefrom  was  that  of  master  and  slave, 
the  industrial  system  was  that  of  chattel  slav- 
ery, and  this  system  became  the  foundation  of 
the  social  order  upon  which,  as  a  superstruc- 
ture, all  social  institutions,  including  military 
establishments,  forms  of  government,  systems  of 
jurisprudence  and  of  morals,  as  well  as  the  gen- 
eral customs,  habits  of  thought  and  temper  of 
the  times,  were  reared.  Human  society  was  a 
slave  society.  Man  lived,  for  the  nonce,  in  an 
environment  of  slavery,  in  a  slave  world. 

But  it  is  of  the  very  essence  of  our  thesis 
that  industrial  technique  is  never  stable,  and  by 
its  slow  advance  invalidates  at  length  the  very 
industrial  system  which  it  once  necessitated.  As 
the  industrial  base  of  the  social  organization 
shifts  the  system  of  industry  itself  and  the  elab- 
orate superstructure  of  social  institutions  raised 
upon  it  become  decadent,  become  the  shelter  of 
strange  abuses  and  perversions,  the  citadel  of 
sinister  interests,  until,  either  peacefully  through 
the  acquiescence  of  the  dominant  class  in  soci- 
ety, or,  more  likely,  in  the  turbulent  clash  of 
warring  classes,  the  old  order  topples  to  its  fall, 
and  a  new  industrial  system  bringing  with  it  new 
conceptions  of  government,  of  law,  of  morals, 
and  the  like,  is  erected  upon  and  in  conformity 


THE  DECADENCE  OF   PURITANISM  71 

with  the  altered  industrial  basis  of  the  social 
life.  Thus,  as  the  increasing  populations  of  Cen- 
tral Asia  found  themselves  unable,  by  reason  of 
the  primitive  character  of  their  industrial  tech- 
nique, to  support  longer  their  teeming  hordes 
upon  the  restricted  area  within  their  possession, 
they  began  that  human  swarming  which  for  thou- 
sands of  years  poured  its  barbarian  floods  across 
the  face  of  Europe,  in  one  epoch  rearing  the 
imperial  structure  of  Roman  domination,  at  an- 
other overwhelming  the  Roman  state,  obliterat- 
ing the  slave  system  of  antiquity  and  for  causes 
already  enumerated  replacing  it  by  the  unique 
device  of  serfdom  and  the  feudal  system.  Again, 
the  growth  of  commerce  and  industry  wrought, 
as  we  have  seen,  the  downfall  of  feudalism  and 
the  establishment  of  modern  capitalism,  though 
the  change  cannot  be  regarded  as  complete  until 
the  debris  of  the  feudal  order  which  still  encum- 
bers modern  society  be  swept  away.  In  similar 
fashion,  even  before  the  change  from  feudalism 
to  capitalism  has  been  fully  accomplished,  the 
unprecedented  advance  in  industrial  technique 
witnessed  by  the  present  age  is  already  under- 
mining capitalistic  society  and  emphasizing  the 
growing  need  of  a  new  industrial  system  and 
social  order  which  shall  conform  to  the  practical 
operation  and  give  full  play  to  the  manifold 


72  PURITANISM 

potentialities  of  modern  industry.  In  the  light  of 
this  established  course  of  social  evolution,  we 
have  now  to  inquire  how  far  Puritanism,  as  the 
ethical  expression  and  output  of  the  trading 
class,  exhibits  symptoms  of  decadence  along 
with  the  capitalistic  system  of  industry  of  which 
it  is  the  by-product  and  support.  It  is  true  that 
while  an  industrial  system  remains  the  practical 
working  form  of  organized  society,  its  attendant 
system  of  morals  can  never  become  wholly  in- 
valid. They  must  sink,  as  they  rise,  together. 
But  before  the  hour  of  doom  has  sounded,  while 
the  edifice  of  the  established  order  still  presents 
a  fair  and  plausible  exterior,  soundly  based  and 
impressive  with  the  serene  majesty  of  the  estab- 
lished fact,  the  critical  eye  may  yet  discern  in 
fissured  stone  and  crumbling  mortar  infallible 
signs  of  the  approaching  end. 

The  test  of  decadence  in  an  industrial  system 
is  whether,  instead  of  promoting  production,  its 
form  has  become  a  hamper  upon  the  productive 
potentialities  of  the  ever  improving  industrial 
technique,  thus  denying  adequate  support  to  the 
population;  in  other  words,  whether  it  has 
ceased  to  feed  the  people.  The  test  of  decadence 
in  a  moral  system  is  whether  its  precepts  longer 
solve  the  problems  and  enforce  the  vital  require- 
ments of  the  time.  As  the  economic  basis  of 


THE  DECADENCE  OF  PURITANISM  73 

society  shifts,  presenting  new  needs  and  new 
obligations  of  social  or  class  conduct,  the  ac- 
cepted moral  precepts,  losing  connection  with 
reality,  cease  to  develop,  and  become  indurated, 
formal,  technical  and  inflexible,  just  in  propor- 
tion as  they  are  no  longer  revivified  by  prac- 
tical application  to  the  concerns  of  daily  exist- 
ence. This  process  of  induration  is  the  earmark 
of  all  decadent  morality.  Accompanying  it  is  an 
over-careful  interpretation,  an  involved  and  ex- 
acting casuistry,  which  substitutes  for  the  obvious 
righteousness  of  common  sense,  the  morbid  re- 
finements and  endless  niceties  of  a  righteousness 
which  exists  only  as  a  parody  of  life.  When 
the  learned  dignitaries  of  the  church  gravely  de- 
bated whether  a  bishop  should  bless  with  two 
fingers  extended  or  with  three,  the  end  of  feudal 
morality  was  in  clear  view.  And  similarly,  when 
the  Puritanism  of  today  laboriously  discusses  the 
proper  length  of  a  girl's  bathing  suit  or  is  ap- 
palled at  the  sin  of  a  Sunday  baseball  game,  the 
fissures  in  the  fair  stonework  of  the  fagade  are 
tolerably  plain.  As  the  process  of  induration 
proceeds  along  with  the  divorce  of  the  precept 
from  the  actualities  of  daily  living,  its  observance 
becomes  more  and  more  but  a  barren  formality, 
an  abracadabra  the  meaning  of  which  has  been 
lost  in  the  mists  of  antiquity,  but  the  traditional 


74  PURITANISM 

sanctity  of  which  still  obtains.  And  it  is  this 
remaining  aroma  of  sanctity  still  lingering  about 
the  mummified  body  of  ancient  virtue  which  not 
unnaturally  misleads  the  latter-day  devotee  into 
the  self-indulgent  belief  that  by  continuing  in 
the  practice  of  it  he  fulfills  all  moral  obligations, 
leaving  him  free  to  act  in  the  new,  vital  and 
practical  affairs  of  his  own  day  in  whatever  un- 
conscionable manner  best  serves  his  own  selfish 
interests.  Thus  an  all  pervading  hollowness  and 
phariseeism  comes  to  mark  the  passing  of  a 
decadent  system  of  ethics.  The  feudal  noble  of 
the  seventeenth  century  whose  delicate  honor 
could  be  cleansed  only  by  the  bloodshed  of  the 
duel,  could  nevertheless  rack-rent  his  tenants  or 
enclose  the  communal  lands  with  no  thought  of 
shame.  So,  today,  many  a  sober  Puritan  serves 
God  by  refusing  to  enter  a  theater,  and  himself 
by  lavishly  watering  the  stock  of  his  favorite 
corporation.  Nor  is  this  sort  of  phariseeism 
necessarily  self-confessed  or  malicious.  It  may 
very  well  be  that  no  one  is  more  thoroughly  de- 
ceived by  it  than  the  pharisee  himself. 

Among  the  more  obvious  evidences  of  Puritan 
decadence  is  the  modern  decline  in  the  practice 
of  the  pristine  economic  virtues  of  the  Puritan 
code.  In  the  evolution  of  capitalism,  the  un- 
precedented wealth  acquired  by  the  trading  class 


THE  DECADENCE  OF  PURITANISM  75 

through  the  exploitation  of  the  workers,  has 
long  since  rendered  the  observance  of  these  vir- 
tues superfluous  so  far  as  the  capitalists  them- 
selves are  concerned.  Accumulation,  instead  of 
depending  on  personal  effort,  now  proceeds  auto- 
matically, and  at  such. a  rate  that  no  amount  of 
idleness,  extravagance,  fatuity  or  dissipation  can 
materially  impede  it.  Accordingly  thrift,  frugal- 
ity, industry,  temperance,  prudence,  simplicity 
and  the  rest  of  the  Puritan  tenets  calculated  im- 
mediately to  further  accumulation,  are  now  suc- 
ceeded by  indolence,  luxury,  ostentation,  waste, 
drunkenness,  lechery  and  the  general  demoraliza- 
tion and  cynical  indifference  to  ethical  obligation 
which  limitless  unearned  wealth  and  easy  secur- 
ity of  life  inevitably  breed.  Even  the  task  of 
the  superintendence  of  industry,  the  performance 
of  which  has  ever  been  the  buckler  of  the  capi- 
talist class  against  all  sorts  of  criticism,  is  now 
generally  delegated  to  hired  managers  whose 
superior  abilities  make  any  interference  by  the 
capitalist  parasites  themselves  a  blundering  im- 
pertinence. Tasks  of  any  kind  have  suffered  a 
depletion  of  ethical  merit  just  in  proportion  as 
they  have  become  unnecessary  to  successful  ac- 
cumulation. But  the  economic  virtues  are  as 
desirable  as  ever  in  the  working  class,  since  by 
their  practice  the  workers  increase  the  margin 


76  PURITANISM 

of  possible  exploitation  to  which  they  can  be 
subjected.  Hence,  thrift,  frugality,  industry, 
temperance,  and  the  like  are  still  eloquently 
urged  upon  the  proletariat,  along  with  patience, 
humility,  obedience,  respect  for  law,  contentment, 
and  the  other  characteristic  moralities  of  class 
servility.  And  as  the  heavenly  guerdon  formerly 
promised  to  the  workers  as  compensation  for 
moral  conduct  has  at  length  become  so  dubious, 
and  as  the  social  and  economic  gulf  between  the 
capitalist  class  and  the  working  class  has  be- 
come so  broad  and  deep  that  no  mere  laborer 
can  hope  to  bridge  it,  the  modern  prize  held  out 
as  a  reward  for  the  cultivation  of  these  and  sim- 
ilar virtues  is  a  position  of  superintendence,  a 
prize  which,  from  the  necessities  of  the  case,  can 
be  attained  by  only  one  in  a  thousand  of  the 
workers,  and,  of  course,  only  by  those  who  de- 
velop a  stature  and  strength,  both  physical  and 
mental,  approximating  the  heroes  of  the  Gre- 
cian myths.  So,  also,  the  improvement  of  the 
conditions  of  labor,  "welfare  work,"  profit  shar- 
ing, old  age  pension  schemes,  emulation  of  rival 
concerns,  the  fostering  of  an  esprit  de  corps,  are 
all  resorted  to,  along  with  the  parade  of  a  pos- 
sible superintendency,  to  stimulate  loyalty  in  the 
workers,  to  inspire  in  them  contentment  and 


THE  DECADENCE  OF  PURITANISM  77 

gratitude,  and  to  render  them  more  submissive 
and  fruitful  subjects  of  exploitation. 

It  is  only  the  larger  accumulators,  however, 
whose  increase  in  substance  has  freed  them  from 
the  economic  moralities  of  the  elder  Puritanism. 
The  observance  of  these  virtues  is  still  of  prac- 
tical significance  to  the  small  accumulators,  the 
petty  bourgeoisie  or  so-called  "middle  class,"  par- 
ticularly that  portion  of  it  which,  by  village  or 
rural  residence,  is  preserved  from  the  eroding, 
corrupting  and  modernizing  influences  of  metro- 
politan existence.  The  snobbish  imitation  of 
superiors  which,  through  the  general  acceptance 
of  the  fiction  of  political  equality,  has  come  to 
pervade  all  ranks  and  classes  of  our  American 
society,  has  led  the  urban  middle  class  to  dis- 
card to  a  large  degree  the  Puritan  restraints  in 
the  hope  of  being  mistaken  by  the  uninitiated  for 
the  very  rich.  Extravagance,  ostentation,  disso- 
luteness and  feminine  idleness  have  thus  come  to 
supplant,  with  the  middle  class  of  the  cities,  the 
early  Puritan  formulas  only  to  a  less  extent  than 
with  the  masters  of  capital  themselves.  But  with 
the  bourgeoisie  of  the  smaller  cities  and  villages, 
which  has  lagged  behind  in  the  general  course  of 
capitalistic  evolution,  Puritanism,  mellowed,  in- 
deed, by  time  and  quietude,  retains  something  of 
its  pristine  rigor  and  authority.  Here,  the  more 


78  PURITANISM 

meager  resources,  the  provincialism,  the  nar- 
rower outlook  on  life,  the  feebler  impact  of  the 
currents  of  change,  conspire  to  nurture  and  pre- 
serve the  Puritan  tradition  and  the  temper  of  its 
earlier  faith.  Thrift,  prudence,  frugality,  indus- 
try, simplicity  are  still  of  service  and  the  normal 
habit  of  daily  life.  The  horror  of  vice  and  dis- 
sipation as  implying  both  moral  turpitude  and 
economic  waste  is  still  fresh  and  keen.  And  the 
enthusiasm  for  legislation  which  shall  constrain 
to  virtue,  if  less  unanimous  than  formerly,  is 
still_active  enough  to  give  a  comfortable  sense  of 
civic  righteousness.  And  it  is  from  this  haven  of 
the  Puritan  spirit  that  the  sectaries  of  the  mod- 
ern city,  through  the  steady  shift  of  population 
to  the  great  urban  centers,  find  their  strength 
renewed  in  their  precarious  conflict  with  an  alien 
culture,  a  rationalizing  criticism,  and  the  en- 
hancement of  personal  freedom  which  the  city 
gives. 

All  ethical  systems  prescribe  the  conduct  of 
the  individual,  but  they  may  be  divided,  roughly, 
into  two  classes,  the  individualistic  and  the  social, 
accordingly  as  the  conduct  regulated  has  to  do 
with  the  person's  private  affairs  or  with  his  rela- 
tions toward  the  group  at  large.  Of  these  two 
classes,  Puritanism  dealt  almost  exclusively  with 
the  individual's  conduct  of  his  own  personal  con- 


THE  DECADENCE  OF  PURITANISM  79 

cerns,  remaining  quite  oblivious  to  the  concep- 
tion of  a  direct  social  obligation.  This  peculiar- 
ity of  Puritan  ethics  arose  from  the  special 
character  of  bourgeois  accumulation.  It  began, 
not  as  a  collective  property  belonging  to  the 
class  as  a  whole,  but  as  an  innumerable  quantity 
of  separate,  private  hoards;  and  it  was  only  in- 
directly, through  the  increase  of  these  personal 
and  private  savings,  that  the  general  class 
business  of  accumulation  was  carried  out. 
The  competitive  antagonisms  is  trade  and  in- 
dustry of  these  petty  private  garnerings  of  capi- 
tal, which  belonged  to  the  immaturity  of  the 
capitalist  system  and  which  have  now  disap- 
peared in  monopolistic  organization,  greatly 
strengthened  the  individualistic  tendency  in  mor- 
als, as  well  as  in  politics  and  other  social  institu- 
tions. The  industrial  system,  indeed,  made  soci- 
ety as  anti-social  as  it  could  well  be  and  remain 
society  at  all.  All  public  activities  were,  and  to 
some  extent  still  are,  viewed  with  mistrust,  and 
that  government  was  deemed  the  best  which  gov- 
erned least.  Nor  has  the  ultimate  social  signifi- 
cance of  the  capitalistic  era,  the  historic  mission 
which  the  bourgeoisie  was  to  discharge  in  the 
larger  drama  of  racial  progress  in  providing  the 
material  equipment  for  man's  mastery  over  na- 
ture, ever  been  perceived  by  the  capitalist  class 


80  PURITANISM 

itself.  Only  now,  in  fact,  is  it  becoming  vaguely 
apparent  to  the  critical  opponents  of  the  system. 
Ignorant,  therefore,  of  the  existence  of  such 
things  as  social  problems,  purposes  or  obliga- 
tions, Puritanism  blindly  yet  effectively  strove  to 
accomplish  an  essentially  social  end,  namely,  the 
accumulation  of  capital,  through  the  regulation 
of  the  personal  habits  and  private  affairs  of  the 
individual  members  of  the  trading  class.  The 
individualistic  point  of  view  thus  imposed  upon 
Puritanism,  expressed  religiously  in  the  doctrines 
of  direct,  personal  responsibility  to  God  and  of 
personal  salvation,  a  point  of  view  sanctified  by 
centuries  of  devoted  enthusiasm  and  inwrought 
into  the  very  fiber  of  Puritan  psychology,  be- 
comes the  explanation  of  that  ineptitude  and  pa- 
thetic futility  with  which  Puritanism  faces  the 
modern  world.  It  can  conceive  nothing  of  the 
individual's  responsibility  to  the  public,  and  on 
being  confronted  by  a  social  problem  is  always 
hopelessly  at  sea.  It  has  never  had  the  least 
understanding  of  sociology,  or  of  those  pro- 
found and  irresistible  economic  forces  which 
direct  and  determine  human  progress.  In  the 
presence  of  the  terrific  struggle  of  contending 
classes  which  rends  its  own  social  scheme  it  can 
only  look  on  aghast,  with  the  pitiful  banalities  of 
individual  propriety  trembling  upon  its  lips.  JTp 


THE  DECADENCE  OF  PURITANISM  81 

this  ignorance,  and  to  the  unsocial  character  of 
Puritan  morality,  must  be  attributed  the  im- 
potence of  the  evangelical  churches  in  attempting 
to  deal  with  the  vital  questions  of  today.  These 
churches  still  preach  the  effete  gospel  of  individ- 
ual regeneration  to  a  world  corrupted  to  the  core 
by  social  injustice  and  clamoring  for  social  re- 
construction. And  they  wonder  that  the  world 
is  not  saved!  The  ritualistic  churches,  trained 
in  the  compact  social  organization  of  feudalism, 
are  in  a  better  condition  to  grapple  with  social 
problems,  as  their  larger  social  activities  amply 
testify.  As  the  turmoil  of  business  competition 
has  lapsed  into  the  calm  of  monopolistic  pro- 
duction, and  as  bourgeois  property,  with  the 
prevalence  of  the  corporate  form  of  business 
enterprise,  has  taken  on  more  and  more  a  col- 
lective character,  it  might  naturally  be  expected 
that  the  moral  code  of  the  trading  class  would 
show  an  increasing  appreciation  of  social  values. 
To  some  extent  this  expectation  has  been  real- 
ized. Some  of  the  more  flagrant  commercial 
abuses  have  received  a  moral  condemnation,  and 
a  higher  standard  of  business  integrity  and  a 
keener  sense  of  civic  duty  have  been  insisted 
upon.  But,  for  the  most  part,  the  limitations  of 
the  individualistic  point  of  view,  so  deeply  in- 
grained in  Puritan  thought,  have  proven  too 


82  PURITANISM 

strong  to  permit  of  any  substantial  alteration  in 
the  Puritan  outlook,  and  the  change  in  the  eco- 
nomic structure  of  bourgeois  production  has 
been  reflected  in  Puritan  morality,  not  as  a  defi- 
nite recognition  of  the  ethical  import  of  social 
relations,  so  much  as  a  dimly  perceived  lack  and 
vacuity  in  the  Puritan  system  which  its  intellec- 
tual custodians  have  not  had  sufficient  ingenuity 
to  fill. 

But  while  the  failure  of  Puritanism  to  "solve 
the  problems  and  enforce  the  vital  requirements" 
of  today  sufficiently  testifies  to  its  decadence,  it 
has  not  been  without  at  least  one  heroic  effort  to 
deal  with  a  modern  social  problem,  an  effortv 
however,  which  has  only  illustrated  its  inherent 
incapacity  for  such  a  task.  The  advent  of  ma- 
chine industry  with  its  persistent  and  exhausting 
drain  upon  the  vitality  of  the  workers  stimulated 
to  an  unusual  degree  the  consumption  of  spiritu- 
ous liquors.  At  the  same  time  the  exigencies  of 
capitalistic  exploitation  required  a  high  and  ever- 
increasing  degree  of  personal  efficiency  among 
the  members  of  the  proletariat.  Working-class 
inebriety  became  a  serious  menace  to  capitalistic 
profits.  To  combat  the  drink  evil  amongst  the 
poor  was  a  prime  necessity  for  the  exploiting 
rich.  To  this  so  congenial  service  Puritanism 
responded  with  gusto.  The  original  injunction 


THE  DECADENCE  OF  PURITANISM  83 

of  temperance,  which  meant  merely  moderation 
in  the  use  of  all  creature  comforts,  proving  to 
be  not  sufficiently  drastic  for  the  new  reform, 
was  altered,  so  far  as  intoxicants  were  con- 
cerned, to  the  novel  virtue  of  total  abstinence. 
True  to  its  individualistic  temper,  Puritanism 
began  its  labors  by  the  attempt  to  reform  the 
individual  drunkard.  The  unfortunate  victims 
of  the  drink  habit  were  importuned  to  take  the 
total  abstinence  pledge,  and  on  doing  so  were 
decorated  with  a  blue  ribbon.  Great  movements 
to  this  end  were  inaugurated,  eloquent  advo- 
cates preached  the  new  sumptuary  precept,  wide- 
spread enthusiasm  greeted  the  new  "temperance" 
crusade.  In  process  of  time,  however,  the  ab- 
sence of  permanent  results  constrained  the  Puri- 
tan cohorts  to  the  conviction  that  the  method  of 
reforming  the  individual  drunkard  was  inade- 
quate. Old  drunkards  lapsed  again  with  regret- 
table promptness  into  bad  habits,  while  the  con- 
stant manufacture  of  new  inebriates  nullified 
such  success  as  was  achieved.  Having  definitely 
grappled  with  a  social  problem,  the  impotence  of 
individualistic  ethics  became  disconcertingly  ap- 
parent. Dimly  recognizing  the  social  character 
of  the  evil,  Puritanism  now  transferred  its  at- 
tack from  the  individual  inebriate  to  the  liquor 
traffic,  from  the  drunkard  to  the  saloon.  The 


84  PURITANISM 

"temperance  crusade"  gave  way  to  the  "prohibi- 
tion movement."  But  still  remaining  ignorant  of 
what  constitute  the  terms  of  a  social  problem, 
still  preserving  with  undiminished  fatuity  its  in- 
dividualistic outlook,  Puritanism  merely  trans- 
muted the  personal  prohibition  against  drinking 
by  the  drunkard,  to  the  personal  prohibition 
against  selling  liquor  by  the  saloon  keeper.  And 
the  old  lust  for  the  legal  sanction,  the  enforce- 
ment of  morality  by  physical  force,  reasserting 
itself,  Puritanism  clamored  for  the  destruction  of 
the  liquor  traffic  by  law.  But  in  this  demand 
Puritanism"  came  into  conflict  with  its  own  eco- 
nomic base,  the  business  interests  of  the  bour- 
geoisie. And  notwithstanding  a  disposition  on 
the  part  of  other  lines  of  capitalistic  enterprise 
to  make  the  liquor  business  serve  as  a  scapegoat 
for  the  manifold  iniquities  of  the  system,  the 
vast  investments  involved  in  the  production  of 
intoxicants  have  successfully  resisted  the  Puri- 
tan onslaught  and  brought  it  to  an  impasse.  The 
habit  of  wild  carousals  is,  indeed,  disappearing; 
but  habitual  drinking  and  the  per  capita  consump- 
tion of  liquor  steadily  increase,  and  must  continue 
to  do  so  until  the  unbearable  strain  which  mod- 
ern industry  and  business  put  upon  human  en- 
durance is  relieved.  To  study  a  social  question 
as  such,  to  inquire  into  the  environment  which 


THE  DECADENCE  OF  PURITANISM  85 

leads  men  to  drink  to  excess,  to  lessen  the  long 
hours  of  exhausting  toil  which  weaken  vitality, 
to  supplement  the  insufficiency  of  food  and 
clothing  which  makes  artificial  stimulation  a  prac- 
tical necessity,  to  bring  color  and  ease  and  gaiety 
into  lives  corroded  with  care  and  drab  with  the 
monotony  of  impoverished  misery — none  of  these 
things  have  yet  occurred  to  the  anxious  minds  of 
the  Puritan  zealots  who  assail  the  drink  evil. 

But  though  we  may  stigmatize  Puritanism  as  a 
decadent  system,  unadapted  to  modern  conditions 
and  incapable  of  meeting  the  issues  of  the  pres- 
ent, there  remain  certain  superficial  symptoms 
of  persisting  vitality  which  should  receive  exami- 
nation. One  of  the  most  notable  of  these  is  the 
extent  to  which  Puritanism  has  succeeded  in  im- 
pressing itself  upon  legislation,  at  least  in  the 
United  States.  Unlike  the  feudal  nobility,  the 
capitalist  class  is  in  the  main  far  too  deeply  im- 
mersed in  private  affairs  to  take  personal  part  in 
the  actual  administration  of  government.  Yet 
for  its  own  protection  and  preservation  it  must 
control  the  machinery  of  government,  to  the  prac- 
tical exclusion  of  the  working  class.  Add  to 
this  the  fact  that  bourgeois  governments  are 
more  or  less  popular  in  form,  and  the  problem 
of  governmental  control  is  not  so  easy  of  solu- 
tion. It  is  met,  in  the  first  instance,  by  restric- 


i 


86  PURITANISM 

tion  of  the  suffrage  by  educational,  residential 
and  property  qualifications ;  by  the  systematic  de- 
luding of  the  electorate  through  the  manipulation 
of  the  sources  of  popular  information,  the  cre- 
ating of  meaningless  party  labels  and  enthusi- 
asms, and  the  solemn  warnings  and  adjurations 
of  the  intellectual  retainers  of  capitalism ;  by  fo- 
menting national  and  racial  animosities ;  and,  lat- 
terly, by  direct  economic  coercion  of  the  voter. 
In  the  second  place,  resort  is  had  to  bribery  of 
legislators  and  governmental  officials.  Bribery 
thus  becomes  an  integral  feature  of  our  system 
of  government.  But  bribery  cannot  be  avowed, 
on  the  contrary  must  always  remain  clandestine, 
because  of  the  fear  of  popular  indignation.  The 
most  elementary  prudence  requires  that  it  be 
ostensibly  condemned  and  an  appropriate  punish- 
ment fixed  for  it.  Now,  nothing  furnishes  a 
more  available  cloak  for  legislative  corruption 
than  the  simultaneous  passage  of  Puritanical 
laws.  No  scandalous  "deal"  with  the  "business 
interests"  but  can  best  be  masked  by  an  anti- 
saloon  or  Sabbath  observance  law.  No  venal 
legislator  but  is  thirsting  for  a  vindication 
through  his  vote  in  support  of  an  anti-cigarette 
measure  or  a  bill  making  "crap-shooting"  a  fel- 
ony. In  this  way  the  statute  books  become 
loaded  with  Puritanical  legislation  which  there  is 


THE  DECADENCE  QF  PURITANISM  87 

no  attempt  or  expectation  of  enforcing,  but 
which  enables  the  Senator  Sorghums  of  our  state 
capitals  to  proudly  defy  criticism  of  their  rec- 
ords. "Surely,  that  bribery  story  must  be  false. 
Did  not  the  good  man  vote  to  close  all  the  mov- 
ing-picture shows  on  Sunday?"  Indeed,  no 
"Praise-God  Barebones"  of  the  Cromwellian  rev- 
olution can  have  surpassed  in  fulsome  devotion 
to  Puritan  ideals  the  American  legislator  in 
whose  capacious  pocket  slumbers  the  pecuniary 
reward  of  the  betrayal  of  the  people's  trust. 

The  show  of  life  lent  to  Puritan  morality  as  a 
covering  for  or  a  reaction  from  the  corruption  of 
legislation  is,  of  course,  spurious  and  misleading. 
But  within  the  last  decade  or  two  there  has  taken 
place  in  American  life  a  real  recrudescence  of  true 
Puritan  sentiment  due  to  the  momentary  eruption 
into  politics  of  the  petty  bourgeoisie  or  mid- 
dle class,  under  the  guise  of  various  "insurgent," 
"good  government"  and  "reform"  movements. 
This  political  activity  of  the  middle  class  has 
been  compelled  by  the  ever  increasing  pressure 
upon  it  of  adverse  economic  conditions.  Funda- 
mentally, its  tribulation  arises  from  the  fact  that 
it  still  employs  an  archaic  industrial  technique, 
adheres  to  obsolete  business  methods,  is,  in  a 
word,  the  pensioner  of  a  dying  industry.  The 
nice  economies  and  high  efficiency  of  the  vast, 


88  PURITANISM 

intensely  modern,  perfectly  equipped  industries 
and  enterprises  of  the  larger  capitalism  are  im- 
possible to  it,  and  competition  with  these  giant 
instrumentalities  of  production  is  for  the  middle 
class  merely  a  lingering  process  of  extinction. 
Add  to  this  the  increasing  resistence  to  unlimited 
exploitation  manifested  by  the  working  class,  and 
the  middle-class  producer  not  inappropriately 
prefigures  himself  as  macerated  between  the  up- 
per millstone  of  the  trusts  and  the  nether  mill- 
stone of  the  labor  unions.  Moreover,  as  private 
monopolies  attain  to  an  effective  control  of  the 
market,  they  put  in  practice  a  monopolistic  over- 
charge which  operates  as  a  true  exploitation  of 
the  petty  bourgeois,  and  which  directly  depletes 
his  already  too  meager  capital  whenever  his 
needs  compel  the  purchase  of  the  monopolized 
product ;  as,  for  instance,  when  in  the  capacity  of 
a  shipper  he  must  buy  transportation  of  the 
great  railroad  consolidations.  A  steady  syphon- 
ing of  his  resources  from  his  pockets  to  the  cof- 
fers of  the  larger  capitalism,  the  consequent 
persistent  loss  of  economic  position,  the  impair- 
ment of  his  standard  of  living,  the  dark  portent 
of  bankruptcy,  the  dread  of  sinking  into  the  un- 
wholesome waters  of  proletarian  misery — all 
these  conspire  to  inflame  the  little  capitalist  with 
a  desperate  resolve  to  dare  and  do,  even  though 


THE  DECADENCE  OF  PURITANISM  89 

he  have  no  very  definite  idea  of  what  is  to  be 
done.  In  this  frame  of  mind,  with  a  true  bour- 
geois confidence  in  the  omnipotence  of  law,  he 
betakes  himself  into  the  political  arena.  Feeling 
that  the  political  issue  is,  for  the  moment,  of  even 
greater  urgency  than  the  personal  conduct  of  his 
business,  he  enters  politics  in  person  rather  than 
through  a  political  agent.  Here  he  finds  opposed 
to  him  the  political  agents  of  the  larger  capital- 
ism, who  as  old  party  politicians  and  office  hold- 
ers, as  members  of  a  political  ring  or  machine, 
or  as  lobbiests  and  legislative  corruptionists, 
serve  the  interests  of  the  great  overlords  of 
capitalistic  enterprise.  Bribery,  at  times  coarse 
and  open,  more  often  subtle  and  indirect,  he 
discovers  to  be  the  approved  method  by  which 
his  large  competitors,  now  become  his  exploiters, 
retain  their  mastery  of  government.  At  this 
point,  he  becomes  a  purifer  of  politics,  a  smasher 
of  political  machines,  an  advocate  of  "good"  gov- 
ernment, a  relentless  prosecutor  of  bribe  givers 
as  well  as  of  bribe  takers.  Later,  having  gained 
some  temporary  success,  he  seeks  by  various  re- 
actionary laws  to  smash  the  trusts,  to  restore 
competition,  to  modernize,  in  short,  by  legal 
enactment  his  archaic  and  obsolete  industrial 
processes.  Also,  he  propounds  various  ultra- 
democratic  measures,  such  as  direct  legislation, 


90  PURITANISM 

the  recall,  and  so  on,  with  the  object  of  restoring 
government  to  the  "people,"  meaning  thereby  his 
own  section  of  the  capitalist  class.  Steeped  in 
the  ideology  of  capitalism,  believing  in  it  and 
its  economics,  morals,  laws,  with  a  faith  far 
more  implicit  than  that  which  he  accords  his 
religious  creed,  himself  an  archeological  remnant 
of  the  infancy  of  the  capitalist  world,  and  yet 
appallingly  and  even  wilfully  ignorant  of  the 
true  structure,  development  and  destiny  of  the 
capitalistic  system,  the  petty  bourgeois  can  no 
more  conceive  of  a  social  reconstruction  in  which 
private  capital  (and  with  it  all  temptation  to 
bribery)  should  disappear,  in  which  his  own 
problems  should  vanish,  in  which  humanity, 
emancipated  and  exalted,  should  stand  supreme 
master  of  its  material  habitat,  than  can  the  fish 
in  the  depths  of  the  salt  sea  conceive  of  the 
world  of  forest  boughs  musical  with  the  cries  of 
a  thousand  birds. 

The  small  capitalist,  or  middle,  class  is,  as  we 
have  seen,  peculiarly  the  repositary,  at  this  time, 
of  Puritan  morality,  as  well  as  the  exponent  of 
the  Puritan  temperament.  With  the  advent  of 
this  element  in  politics  comes,  perforce,  a  stream 
of  Puritan  legislation  and  regulation,  through 
which  the  "reformer,"  with  perfect  sincerity  and 
a  childlike  ingenuousness,  seeks  to  improve  soci- 


THE  DECADENCE  OF  PURITANISM  91 

ety.  Believing  that  the  course  of  human  progress 
can  be  turned  back  by  law,  it  is  not  unnatural 
that  he  should  believe  that  people  can  be  made 
virtuous  by  law.  And,  not  daring  to  assail  the 
vices  of  his  "betters,"  it  is  also  natural,  as  well 
as  vividly  illustrative  of  the  Puritan  habit  of 
mind,  that  the  ban  should  fall  most  relentlessly 
upon  the  lean  and  meager  pleasures  of  the  poor. 
The  revival  of  Puritanism  incidental  to  the  in- 
trusion of  the  petty  bourgeoisie  into  politics  can 
last  no  longer  than  the  phenomenon  itself  is  at- 
tended with  some  measure  of  practical  success. 
And  that  its  success  must  necessarily  be  ephem- 
eral is  decreed  by  the  very  conditions  which 
called  the  movement  into  being.  The  ceaseless 
absorption  of  the  property  of  the  middle  class 
and  smaller  capitalists  by  the  larger  capitalism, 
persistently  impairs  the  political  power  and  pres- 
tige of  the  victims  and  renders  them  politically 
impotent.  Property  is  power,  and  loss  of  prop- 
erty spells  the  inevitable  ruin  of  political  hopes. 
It  would  be  an  unheard  of  anomaly,  did  an  eco- 
nomically dying  faction  progress  to  political  su- 
premacy. With  the  recession  of  middle-class 
insurgency  will  end  the  brief  episode  of  Puritan 
reanimation.  Two  vast  and  somber  hosts,  the 
larger  capitalism  and  the  working  class,  will 
then  confront  each  other,  the  first  of  which  has 


92  PURITANISM 

lost  its  Puritan  heritage,  the  second  of  which 
has  never  assimilated  Puritan  standards  or  ideals. 
A  further  temporary  reinforcement  of  Puri- 
tanism comes  with  the  entry  of  women  into  poli- 
tics and  public  affairs.  In  the  early  days  of  the 
bourgeoisie,  woman  was  still,  as  under  feudalism, 
the  home  and  housekeeper,  was  still  engaged  in 
the  labor  of  those  household  arts  which,  by  since 
gravitating  to  the  factory  in  obedience  to  the 
improvement  of  industrial  technique,  have  com- 
pelled women  to  follow  them  into  wage  indus- 
try. As  a  member  of  the  family  of  which  the 
male  was  the  head,  woman  received  her  support 
through  him,  and,  notwithstanding  the  great 
desert  of  her  labor,  was  thus  placed  in  a  posi- 
tion of  dependency  upon  the  male,  with  whose 
fortunes  her  own  livelihood  was  bound  up.  In 
this  position  her  entire  economic  interest  was 
embodied  in  the  observance  of  Puritan  standards 
by  the  male,  as  she  was  thus  assured  of  kind- 
ness, fidelity  and,  above  all,  adequate  economic 
support.  Under  the  tutelage  of  this  situation,  the 
feminine  mind  became  an  immense  and  inexhaust- 
ible reservoir  of  Puritan  preconceptions.  That 
men  should  be  industrious,  prudent,  frugal, 
thrifty,  and  so  on,  and  that  they  should  shun 
those  vices  and  dissipations  which  impaired  their 
economic  efficiency,  became  the  Alpha  and  Omega 


THE  DECADENCE  OF  PURITANISM  93 

of  feminine  morality.  Women  thus  became  the 
moral  monitors  of  the  male  sex,  from  which  fact 
has  arisen  the  popular  illusion  of  their  superior 
virtue.  As  women  have  followed  their  jobs  from 
the  kitchen  into  the  factory  and  have  thus  gained 
economic  independence  of  the  male  (though  sub- 
stituting therefor  the  general  class  dependence  of 
the  workers  upon  the  proprietors)  they  have 
borne  with  them  all  of  their  Puritan  preposses- 
sions, and,  as  their  new  found  part  in  industry 
leads  them  inevitably  to  press  into  politics  and 
demand  the  full  panoply  of  citizenship,  they  still 
carry  along  this  Puritan  morality,  which  now 
becomes  their  guide  in  their  fulfillment  of  the 
novel  civic  functions  and  obligations  they  insist 
upon  undertaking.  It  is  only  as  the  new  indus- 
trial circumstances  in  which  woman  finds  herself 
gradually  school  her  to  a  recognition  of  the 
paramount  importance  to  her  of  her  interests  as 
a  wage  worker,  over  her  lost  and  abandoned  in- 
terests as  a  feminine  dependent  of  the  male,  that 
her  Puritanism  may  be  expected  to  become  sub- 
ordinate to  the  larger,  more  fundamental  and 
more  ,  urgent  social  and  economic  issues  upon 
the  successful  solution  of  which  her  own  fate 
has  at  length  come  to  depend. 

As  the  test  of  the  decadence  of  a  moral  sys- 
tem is  whether  it  longer  solves  the  problems  and 


94  PURITANISM 

enforces  the  vital  requirements  of  the  time,  so 
an  evidence  of  continuing  vitality  is  found  in  the 
ability  to  recognize  and  compel  obedience  to  new 
duties  which  develop  in  the  course  of  social 
growth.  Besides  the  invention  of  the  virtue  of 
total  abstinence  from  intoxicants,  there  is  one 
other  instance  in  which  the  trading  class  has 
devised  a  new  virtue,  or,  rather,  has  attempted 
to  revive  a  very  old  one,  in  the  endeavor  to  but- 
tress its  position  and  prolong  the  exploitation  of 
the  working  class.  This  revamped  virtue  is  that 
of  patriotism,  the  labor  of  inculcating  which 
Puritanism  has  cheerfully  undertaken.  Patriot- 
ism is  not  a  distinctively  Puritan  virtue.  On  the 
contrary,  the  early  record  of  the  trading  class 
was  one  of  persistent  and  eventually  triumphant 
rebellion  against  constituted  authority  both  in 
church  and  state.  But  the  seizure  of  political 
power  by  the  bourgeoisie  has,  in  modern  times, 
transformed  that  class  into  the  due  object  of  pa- 
triotic devotion,  while  the  overmastering  need  of 
foreign  markets  and  the  increasing  solidarity 
and  growing  discontent  of  the  working  class 
have  made  a  revival  of  militarism,  which  always 
attends  on  patriotic  fervor,  of  the  utmost  im- 
portance to  capitalistic  profits.  The  irresistible 
advance  of  the  capitalist  system  of  industry  has 
transformed  the  civilized  world  into  a  vast  fac- 


THE  DECADENCE  OF  PURITANISM  95 

tory,  in  which  national  distinctions  have  been  all 
but  obliterated.  The  seemingly  interminable 
combats  for  territorial  acquisition  which  dis- 
turbed the  middle  ages  have  at  length  ended  in 
what  is  a  relatively  fixed  delimitation  of  national 
boundaries.  The  easy  and  rapid  methods  of 
communication  of  our  day  have  facilitated  ac- 
quaintance, understanding  and  sympathy  between 
the  most  diverse  peoples.  Group  antagonisms 
grow  daily  less  and  less.  On  the  other  hand, 
with  the  spread  of  capitalist  industry,  the  antag- 
onism between  capitalist  and  proletarian,  between 
proprietor  and  worker,  between  employer  and 
employe,  which  is  inherent  in  the  system,  becomes 
of  ever  increasing  moment,  sweeps  over  national 
boundaries,  brushes  aside  racial  distinctions,  and 
assumes  a  world  character.  Capitalists  and  pro- 
letarians alike  have  effected  international  organ- 
izations. As  national  and  racial  animosities  pale 
before  the  rapidly  intensifying  issues  of  the  in- 
ternational class  struggle,  the  .desirability  of 
keeping  them  artificially  alive  in  the  interest  of 
the  proprietors  has  become  clear  to  the  astute 
minds  of  the  intellectual  retainers  of  the  capi- 
talist class.  By  reviving  the  dead  or  dying  senti- 
ments of  national  and  racial  hostility,  by  preach- 
ing a  flatulent,  jingo  patriotism,  the  workers  of 
the  world  may  still  be  divided  and  disorganized, 


96  PURITANISM 

may  be  set  to  the  barren  labor  of  destroying  each 
other  in  armed  strife,  may  be  fired  by  a  spirit  of 
loyalty  to  flag  and  country  which  are,  for  all 
practical  purposes,  the  oligarchs  of  capital  them- 
selves. That  this  attempted  resurrection  of 
militarism  and  the  aimless  slaughter  of  innocent 
millions  which  it  implies  are  utterly  antithetical 
both  to  the  letter  and  spirit  of  the  gospel  of 
Jesus,  has  not  prevented  the  Puritan  sectaries 
from  touting  it  enthusiastically.  Even  the  cor- 
rupting, of  the  minds  of  children  is  complacently 
undertaken.  Laws  are  enacted  requiring  the  na- 
tional colors  to  be  displayed  over  school  houses ; 
churches  organize  their  little  ones  into  military 
cadets;  the  fires  of  racial  jealousies  are  energetic- 
ally fanned;  conservative  newspapers  contain 
dark  hints  of  coming  wars;  nations  vie  with 
each  other  in  the  scandalous  waste  of  useless 
armaments;  military  establishments  are  diligent- 
ly fostered.  In  this  last  item  the  capitalist  class 
reaps,  also,  an  incidental  but  very  real  and  prac- 
tical advantage.  Large  and  efficient  military 
establishments  are  of  use  in  stamping  out  the 
flames  of  proletarian  rebellion  at  home.  Soldiers 
are  valuable  in  case  of  strikes. 

On  the  whole,  therefore,  while  there  are  un- 
mistakable proofs  of  ineptitude  and  decay  in  the 
texture  of  the  Puritan  system,  we  cannot  say  of 


THE  DECADENCE  OF  PURITANISM  97 

it  that  it  is  wholly  moribund.  It  still  seems  fair- 
ly clear  that  the  last  degeneracy,  the  putrescence 
which  follows  dissolution,  has  not  yet  been 
reached  by  Puritan  morality.  This  closing  stage 
in  the  annals  of  any  ethical  code  is  arrived  at 
when  the  general  corruption  which  attends  a  pe- 
riod of  social  decadence  rises  till  it  engulfs  the 
very  custodians  of  morality  themselves,  who,  be- 
coming wholly  and  confessedly  venal,  proceed 
to  barter  righteousness  to  the  desiring  purchaser 
as  any  marketable  commodity  might  be  sold. 
The  basic  function  of  morality,  that  of  re- 
straining the  individual  in  the  interest  of  social  or 
class  welfare,  is  thus  abandoned  for  the  sordid 
lure  of  a  price.  The  individual  may  buy  his 
moral  justification  as  he  buys  his  clothes.  Such 
a  point  was  reached  in  the  history  of  feudal 
morality  when  the  sale  of  indulgences  roused  the 
flaming  denunciations  of  Luther  and  ushered  in 
the  protestant  reformation  in  Germany.  Such  a 
point  had  previously  been  reached  in  classic  his- 
tory when  the  predictions  of  the  Roman  augurs 
became  a  matter  of  purchase  and  of  jest.  Much 
of  Puritan  morality  has  been  discarded  by  the 
haut  noblesse  of  capitalism.  The  individualistic 
point  of  view  of  Puritanism  has  been  antiquated 
by  the  increasingly  co-operative  character  of  in- 
dustry and  the  social  problems  it  presents.  There 


98  PURITANISM 

is  a  widespread  indifference  to  all  matters  of 
religious  and  moral  significance  which  makes  it 
doubtful  if  the  approbation  of  the  custodians  of 
the  accepted  morality  would  even  be  deemed 
worth  purchasing.  But  there  is  no  very  cogent 
evidence  that  it  has  yet  become  the  subject  of 
individual  sale.  And  still,  in  view  of  the  sober 
assertion  that  seven  men  in  the  United  States 
control  the  industrial  and  commercial  activities 
of  ninety  millions  of  people,  the  inquiry  how  long 
Puritanism  can  resist  the  insidious  yet  over- 
whelming potency  of  concentrated  wealth  may 
well  give  concern  to  those  who  are  interested  in 
preserving  its  integrity. 


CHAPTER  V 

PURITANISM  AND  ASCETICISM 

The  history  of  human  progress  has  been  the 
history  of  the  slow  triumph  of  intelligence  over 
its  material  environment.  This  triumph  is  won 
through  the  study  of  material  things,  their  con- 
stitution and  their  laws,  and  the  devising  of 
means  to  modify  and  control  them;  in  other 
words,  through  scientific  discovery  and  mechan- 
ical invention.  But  for  countless  ages,  this  direct 
contest  between  man  and  nature  was  in  a  meas- 
ure postponed  for  the  more  important  work  of 
peopling  the  globe.  During  the  vast  tribal  migra- 
tions which  accomplished  this  latter  purpose, 
and  the  state  of  constant  warfare  which  accom- 
panied them,  but  little  opportunity  was  allowed 
for  that  settled  culture  which  alone  could  form 
the  basis  of  scientific  research.  It  is  not  sur- 
prising, therefore,  if  the  more  ambitious  minds, 
those  in  which  enthusiasm  for  intellectual  and 
spiritual  progress  burned  strongest,  should  at- 
tempt to  construct  what  might  be  termed  a  short 
cut  to  the  complete  victory  of  human  intelligence 
over  its  material  encasements.  To  this  end, 
various  occult  and  mystical  philosophies  were 
99 


100  PURITANISM 

framed,  trances  and  ecstasies  practiced,  and, 
what  is  more  to  our  immediate  purpose,  a  sys- 
tematic warfare  entered  into  against  all  bodily 
comforts  and  desires.  The  body,  which  is  the 
most  intimate  material  phenomenon  the  mind 
encounters,  and  which  fixes  those  primary  physi- 
cal limitations  which  it  is  the  business  of  culture 
to  transcend,  became  also  the  type  and  personi- 
fication of  that  vast  and  vague  hostility  which  it 
was  felt  material  nature  expressed  towards  the 
spirit  of  man.  Spiritual,  and  also  intellectual, 
progress  was  therefore  conceived  as  made  against 
the  body,  in  despite  arid  defiance  of  it.  Man 
split  himself,  in  his  own  thought,  into  a  dualism 
of  flesh  and  spirit,  and  "the  flesh  lusteth  against 
the  spirit  and  the  spirit  against  the  flesh."  Cer- 
tain bodily  desires,  indeed,  such  as  those  for  food 
and  sleep,  could  not  be  wholly  set  at  naught 
without  incurring  the  penalty  of  personal  extinc- 
tion. Yet,  by  fasts,  vigils  and  the  like,  their  sat- 
isfaction could  be  successfully  minimized.  Of 
the  physical  appetites  which  might  be  entirely 
suppressed  without  costing  life,  by  far  the  most 
powerful  was  that  of  sex.  Hence  the  contest 
resolved  itself  largely  into  a  battling  against  the 
sexual  impulse.  Celibacy,  and  the  suppression 
of  all  sexual  desires,  became  the  pathway  to 
spiritual  excellence. 


PURITANISM  AND  ASCETICISM  101 

Asceticism  is  very  old.  In  the  dim  barbarisms 
of  the  past,  before  specialization  had  occurred 
in  the  field  of  intellectual  endeavor,  when  all 
matters  of  intellectual  pursuit  were  committed 
indiscriminately  to  the  priests,  the  practices  of 
asceticism  were  merged  with  religious  rites,  and 
religion  has  ever  since,  as  the  custodian  of  spirit- 
ual things,  regarded  asceticism  with  favorable 
eyes.  Particularly  has  this  been  the  case  with 
those  reform  or  revolutionary  religious  cults 
which  arise  as  reactions  to  the  general  profligacy 
of  the  times.  Thus  primitive  Christianity,  and 
again  Puritanism,  representing  reactions  against 
eras  of  moral  license  and  social  corruption,  were 
powerfully  impregnated  with  the  ascetic  spirit. 
In  the  case  of  Puritanism,  moreover,  asceticism 
found  a  sound  economic  basis  in  the  splendid 
aid  it  rendered  to  capitalistic  accumulation.  In- 
deed, nascent  capitalism  must  have  been  ascetic 
if  for  no  other  reason  than  the  necessity  of  facili- 
tating the  accumulation  of  property.  The  virtue 
of  frugality  was  even  more  an  economic  impera- 
tive than  a  religious  discipline.  And  in  this 
fruitful  soil  of  economic  necessity  the  seeds  of 
the  ancient  ascetic  teachings  bourgeoned  luxuri- 
antly. With,  however,  this  difference.  In  the 
older  and,  one  must  believe,  wiser  religions,  such 
as  Buddhism  and  feudal  Christianity,  special 


102  PURITANISM 

provision  was  made  for  the  ascetic  by  the  estab- 
lishment of  monkish  orders.  The  practice  of 
asceticism  was  not  a  popular  obligation,  but  only 
a  special  means  of  grace.  Only  those  whose 
"vocation"  it  was  were  constrained  to  undertake 
its  self-immolations.  But  with  the  sects  of  the 
protestant  reformation  the  case  was  otherwise. 
In  the  first  place,  the  exigencies  of  capitalist 
accumulation  required  the  practice  of  the  ascetic 
virtues  by  all  members  of  the  rising  bourgeoisie. 
In  the  second  place,  the  monkish  orders  had  be- 
come among  the  strongest  buttresses  of  the 
feudal  church,  and  in  its  historic  antagonism  to 
that  church  protestantism  was  constrained  to 
denounce  and  repudiate  all  monkish  institutions. 
Hence  it  came  about,  for  the  first  time  in  human 
history,  that  asceticism  became  of  universal  obli- 
gation. All  were  constrained  to  practice  abnega- 
tion of  the  body,  for  the  double  purpose  of  sav- 
ing the  soul  and  of  saving  money.  The  perver- 
sions of  asceticism  having  become  universally 
binding,  the  only  escape  from  a  perverted  world 
back  to  a  normal  life  was  through  sin,  which 
thus  became  healthy,  normal  and  peculiarly  al- 
luring. All  that  was  glad,  all  that  was  gay,  colors 
that  pleased  the  eye,  songs  that  caressed  the  ear, 
the  idle  dalliance  of  love,  the  wine  cup  and  the 
kiss,  fine  raiment  and  delicate  food,  the  jewels 


PURITANISM   AND  ASCETICISM  103 

of  earth  and  the  heavenly  jewels  of  art,  every- 
thing that  made  up  the  web  and  woof  of  the 
joy  of  life,  became  sinful  because  involving  the. 
expenditure  of  money  and  of  time  which  could 
beget  money,  and  because  pandering  to  the  lusts 
of  that  supreme  enemy  of  the  soul,  the  sadly 
abused  body.  Pious  existence  became  a  somber 
gray,  a  monotone  of  industry  and  frugality,  va- 
ried only  by  auto-hypnotic  religious  ecstasies  and 
frenzies  more  suggestive  of  bedlam  than  of  a 
sane  and  happy  earth.  It  is  no  great  wonder 
that,  put  to  the  test,  the  world  as  a  whole  has 
chosen  sin. 

The  parsimony  of  the  trading  class,  which,  at 
the  beginning,  was  its  chief  method  of  accumu- 
lating wealth,  had  already  dictated  the  observ- 
ance of  chastity  as  a  virtue.  The  ascetic  disci- 
pline so  eagerly  welcomed  by  Puritanism,  and 
which  had  for  its  most  important  object  the  ut- 
ter eradication  of  the  sexual  impulse,  finding 
itself  measurably  justified  by  the  economic  needs 
of  the  bourgeoisie,  flamed  into  the  most  lurid, 
fantastic  and  absurd  excesses  in  the  matter  of 
sex  repression.  Not  content  with  condemning 
sexual  irregularities,  all  natural  and  perfectly 
normal  sex  instincts  and  desires  were  placed 
under  ban.  Sex  itself  became  evil.  Anything 
which  suggested  sex  was  of  the  devil.  The 


104  PURITANISM 

beautiful  processes  of  generation  and  birth  be- 
came disgraceful  and  degrading,  and  the  divine 
handiwork  was  unhesitatingly  ascribed  to  the 
machinations  of  Satan.  This  attitude  required 
that  any  and  everything  in  which  the  most  pruri- 
ent fancy  could  find  the  remotest  suggestion  of 
sex  should  be  prohibited.  The  immemorial 
amusement  of  dancing,  once  dignified  as  a  relig- 
ious rite  but  which  was  already  under  suspicion 
as  involving  a  waste  of  time  and  energy  which 
might  be  devoted  to  toil,  was  discovered  to 
pander  in  some  way  to  carnal  desires  and  was 
summarily  forbidden.  All  matters  of  study  or 
reflection  which  touched  upon  the  subject  of  sex 
became  taboo,  and  could  not  be  mentioned.  All 
exercises  of  the  creative  imagination  were  sub- 
ject to  censorship  and  condemnation.  That  a 
man  should  kiss  his  wife  on  Sunday  was  ac- 
counted a  crime.  And  as  the  prohibitions  multi- 
plied, so,  by  a  familiar  psychological  law,  did  the 
suggestions  (since  prohibition  is  itself  a  sugges- 
tion) until  Puritanism  found  itself  involved  in  a 
welter  of  pruderies  and  pruriencies  which  made 
it  the  most  astonishing  spectacle,  not,  indeed,  of 
sexual  indulgence,  but  of  sexual  viciousness  the 
world  has  ever  seen. 

With  a  surplus  of  material  necessities  at  hand, 
arising  either  from  his  own  labor  or  the  exploi- 


PURITANISM   AND  ASCETICISM  105 

tation  of  others,  man  finds  in  the  period  of  con- 
sequent leisure  he  enjoys,  opportunity  for  obedi- 
ence to  those  desires  other  than  his  animal  wants 
the  possession  of  which  sets  him  apart  from  other 
animals  as  destined  to  spiritual  growth  and  ex- 
cellence. Among  these  are  the  love  of  beauty 
and  the  instinct  of  craftsmanship,  the  motives 
which  lead  to  artistic  creation.  In  this  material 
surplus,  therefore,  lies  the  economic  foundation 
of  art.  But  it  was  precisely  upon  this  surplus 
of  material  wealth  that  the  bourgeoisie  laid 
hands  for  the  purpose  of  capitalistic  accumula- 
tion. From  the  point  of  view  of  the  trading 
class,  the  devotion  of  this  surplus  to  the  sus- 
tenance of  art  was  sheer  waste.  Science,  indeed, 
drew  likewise  upon  the  same  surplus  for  support, 
but  science  the  bourgeoisie  needed  in  its  indus- 
trial and  commercial  enterprises  and  was  willing 
to  pay  for.  Not  so  with  art.  Art  was  needless, 
was  hence  an  extravagance,  a  luxury,  the  costly 
product  of  energies  that  had  much  better  be 
spent  in  material  production.  Puritanism,  there- 
fore, looked  askance  at  art.  But  point  and  venom 
was  given  to  this  latent  hostility  by  the  ascetic 
content  of  Puritanism.  Without  essaying  a 
formal  definition  of  art,  it  may  be  said  that  its 
chief  business  is  to  create  beauty  by  imitating, 
repeating  or  harmonizing  the  lavish  beauties  of 


106  PURITANISM 

the  world  of  phenomena  in  which  we  live.  Now, 
in  all  this  phenomenal  world  which  is  the  subject 
matter  of  artistic  effort,  next  to  the  necessity  of 
preserving  the  individual  life  and  the  economic 
facts  attendant  thereon,  by  far  the  most  impor- 
tant things  to  all  vital  organisms,  including  the 
human  race,  are  the  function  of  reproduction 
and  the  attendant  facts  of  sex.  Hence  it  is 
manifest  that  no  art  can  discharge  its  sacred 
function,  can  justify  itself  or  be  worthy  of  the 
name,  which  does  not  fully  and  amply  recognize 
sex,  with  all  its  beautiful  and  terrible  implica^ 
tions.  For  Puritanism,  however,  such  recogni- 
tion is  of  the  devil,  and  all  art  which  suggests  or 
admits  the  possibility  of  sex  is  of  diabolic  origin. 
Sculpture,  painting^  poetry,  fiction,  music,  all 
were  either  emasculated  to  suit  the  Puritan  taste, 
or,  better  still,  were  incontinently  damned  with- 
out a  hearing.  The  more  truly  they  mirrored 
nature,  the  more  thoroughly  were  they  repro- 
bated. The  assumed  innocence  of  sexless  hi' 
fancy  became  a  standard  of  moral  purity  by 
which  all  artistic  values  were  measured  and  to 
which  adult  men  and  women  were  expected  to 
conform.  Fiction  must  be  written  with  an  eye 
single  to  the  blushing  cheek  of  Thackeray's  ter- 
rible "young  person."  Statues  and  paintings 
depicting  the  human  form  must  be  duly  draped 


PURITANISM   AND  ASCETICISM  107 

to  escape  the  anathema  of  Puritan  criticism. 
Music  was  confined  to  psalm-singing,  and  poetry 
to  the  dismal  resonances  of  Paradise  Lost.  But 
while  Puritanism  viewed  all  art  with  disap- 
proval, it  was  against  the  theater  that  its  ani- 
mosities were  particularly  directed.  Here  the 
condemnation  was  complete  and  irrevocable,  for 
not  only  must  the  drama,  as  the  mirror  of  human 
life,  feature  sex  so  strongly,  but  the  art  of  the 
theater  is,  of  all  the  arts,  economically  the  most 
expensive  to  support.  With  the  fabulous  accum- 
ulations of  wealth  which  the  trading  class  of  to- 
day has  achieved,  and  its  consequent  indulgence 
in  a  more  lavish  expenditure  for  non-economic 
ends,  it  has  altered  to  a  great  degree  its  attitude 
toward  the  arts,  even  toward  the  drama,  and  has 
become  their  fairly  liberal  patron ;  and  though  no 
truly  great  and  noble  art  can  be  coddled  to  ma- 
turity by  select  patronage  but  must  draw  its 
nurture  from  the  fecund  bosom  of  that  mighty 
mother,  the  people's  self,  still  the  paralyzing 
effect  of  the  earlier  Puritan  hostility  has  been  in 
large  measure  overcome.  Now  and  then,  indeed, 
a  faint  though  acrimonious  protest  against  the 
stage  still  rises  from  some  evangelical  pulpit,  but 
without  meeting  with  serious  consideration  or 
popular  response.  The  woeful  business  of  capi- 
talistic accumulation  having  been  at  length  com- 


108  PURITANISM 

pleted,  the  deep  instincts  of  the  human  heart  for 
beauty  and  for  skill  in  labor  reassert  themselves, 
with  resplendent  promise  of  the  achievement 
which  the  new  stores  of  wealth  make  possible 
in  art. 

And  asceticism  itself  is  slowly  yielding  to  a 
healthy  sanity.  For  with  the  increase  of  scien- 
tific knowledge,  and  the  mastery  over  nature 
which  discovery  and  invention  increasingly  con- 
fer, is  dawning  the  perception  that  man's  mate- 
rial environment  is  not  to  be  conquered  by  bodily 
abnegation  and  abuse,  but  by  the  fairer  means 
of  investigation  of  nature's  secrets,  of  study  and 
experiment,  by  which  understanding  of  her  la\vs 
may  be  gained,  control  over  her  forces  secured, 
and  insight  reached  as  to  the  ultimate  meaning  of 
man's  existence.  Labors  of  this  sort  are  only 
hindered,  not  helped,  by  the  ascetic  discipline. 
For  the  more  a  normal  bodily  appetite  is 
thwarted  or  repressed,  the  more  insistent  it  be- 
comes, the  more  attention  it  compels,  and  the 
larger  part  it  plays  in  the  total  life  experience  of 
the  individual.  Asceticism  thus  defeats  itself. 
Instead  of  freeing  the  spirit  from  the  shackles  of 
bodily  desires  and  limitations  it  but  strengthens 
them  and  welds  them  more  firmly.  Not  until 
asceticism  is  carried  to  a  point  where  it  exerts  a 
definitely  lethal  effect,  where  the  life  of  the  body 


PURITANISM  AND  ASCETICISM  109 

is  substantially  impaired,  where,  in  short,  the 
ascetic  becomes  a  quasi-suicide,  does  it  accom- 
plish its  end  of  minimizing  the  strength  of  the 
physical  appetites  and  needs.  And  then  only  in 
proportion  as  it  has  worked  the  death  of  the 
body.  Surely  of  all  the  weird  creations  of  bar- 
barian fancy,  of  all  errors  into  which  the  fathom- 
less ignorance  of  nature  has  led  mankind,  the 
belief  that  excellence  of  any  sort  could  be  at- 
tained by  the  defeat  of  life,  by  the  refusal  of 
life's  experiences,  by  the  breaking  and  marring 
of  the  exquisite  functions  of  physical  existence 
which  have  been  built  up  through  eons  of  na- 
ture's slow  evolutionary  processes,  is  the  most 
strange.  And  as  it  is  the  most  strange  so,  in  all 
rational  thought,  must  it  be  accounted  the  most 
evil.  For  unless  philosophic  pessimism  is  right 
and  creation  itself  is  evil,  there  can  plainly  be 
no  greater  wickedness  than  deliberately  /-c  set 
oneself  against  the  course  and  majesty  of  natural 
development.  Nor  can  there  be  any  greater  im- 
pertinence of  the  finite  intellect  than  thus  to 
deny  the  validity  of  what  nature  herself  has 
ordained.  For  those  to  whom  life  is  good,  and 
earth  is  fair,  and  the  travail  of  the  phenomenal 
universe  is  justified,  asceticism  must  ever  rank 
as  the  supreme  blasphemy. 


110  PURITANISM 

In  our  own  day,  where  the  western  edge  of 
the  American  continent  dips  beneath  the  warm 
green  waters  of  the  Pacific,  is  being  completed 
that  mighty  pilgrimage  upon  which,  from  their 
ancestral  home  in  Central  Asia,  the  Aryan  races, 
ages  ago,  before  the  era  of  recorded  history,  set 
forth  toward  the  empty  and  alluring  West.  Be- 
gun on  foot,  or  with  the  laborious  ox-cart,  this 
vast  migration,  sweeping  over  Europe  and  Amer- 
ica, is  being  completed  with  the  steamship,  the 
steam  railroad,  the  trolley  and  automobile.  In 
its  course,  great  civilizations  have  risen,  flour- 
ished and  decayed,  industrial  progress  has  again 
and  again  refashioned  the  Western  world,  relig- 
ions and  philosophies  have  waxed  and  waned, 
and,  withal,  a  marvelous  store  of  culture,  of 
scientific  advancement  and  mechanical  triumph, 
has  been  won  as  a  permanent  possession  of  the 
race.  In  this  long  conquest  of  the  virgin  lands, 
the  struggle  to  subdue  to  human  service  the 
endless,  mysterious  forest,  the  forbidding  moun- 
tain chain,  malignant  swamp  and  tempestuous 
sea,  was  borne  by  hardy  adventurous  spirits 
whose  grim  toil  left  neither  leisure  nor  fruitage 
sufficient  to  support  a  cultural  development  be- 
yond their  primitive  needs.  Only  in  the  more 
settled  communities  to  the  eastward,  where  the 
period  of  frontier  struggle  had  been  outlived  and 


PURITANISM  AND  ASCETICISM  111 

where  increasing  wealth  and  broadening  com- 
merce had  laid  the  foundation  of  leisure  and 
intellectual  opportunity,  could  science,  art,  litera- 
ture, invention,  philosophy  grow  to  commanding 
heights.  In  any  given  period,  therefore,  the  ad- 
vancing frontier  of  Aryan  migration  has  been 
compelled  to  look  backward  toward  the  East  for 
light  and  knowledge.  While  the  territorial  prog- 
ress has  been  westward,  intellectual  and  spiritual 
progress  has  been  won  in  the  East,  and  having 
been  first  achieved  there  reaches  the  West  later 
as  an  importation.  Thus  the  civilization  and  en- 
lightenment of  Greece  was  drawn  from  Egyptian 
and  Assyrian  sources,  the  culture  of  Rome  came 
from  Greece,  that  of  Spain  and  Gaul  from 
Rome,  that  of  Latin  American  from  France  and 
Spain.  Similarly,  Northern  Europe  drew  its  cul- 
ture from  Rome  and  medieval  Italy,  and  trans- 
mitted it  to  Anglo-Saxon  America,  where  it 
spreads  ever  from  east  to  west.  Now,  the  true 
antidote  to  Puritanism,  both  as  a  formal  code  of 
conduct  and  as  a  spiritual  bias  and  deformity,  is 
precisely  this  scientific  comprehension  of  nature 
and  of  human  history,  and  its  concomitant  phil- 
osophical illumination,  which  culture  brings. 
Not  in  license,  not  in  abnormal  indulgence  of 
the  appetites  or  unrestrained  practice  of  the  vices 
which  Puritanism  condemns,  is  to  be  found  the 


112  PURITANISM 

true  corrective  of  asceticism  and  of  the  Puritan 
ordering  of  life.  These  but  breed  Puritanical 
reactions,  which  aggravate  the  fundamental  igno- 
rance and  evil.  Only  in  the  superior  wisdom 
which  correctly  appraises  the  worth  of  the  body, 
which  divines  the  true  intent  of  nature,  which 
perceives  the  ultimate  worth  and  strives  for  the 
sacred  fulfillment  of  joyous,  resurgent,  all-vic- 
torious life,  can  the  grim  distortions,  the  dark 
agonies,  of  the  Puritanical  and  ascetic  obsessions 
find  solvent  and  healing.  And  this  superior  wis- 
dom, this  culture  and  illumination,  arise  first  in 
the  East,  while  Puritanism,  and  the  Puritan 
habit  and  temper,  linger  in  the  West — in  America 
rather  than  in  Europe,  in  the  country  rather  than 
in  the  city,  in  the  minds  of  the  elder  generation 
schooled  in  the  narrow  ignorance  of  age,  rather 
than  in  the  aspiring  candor  of  youth.  And  the 
fear  of  youth,  of  what  it  may  adventure  and  of 
what  it  may  determine  for  itself,  is,  like  the  fear 
of  enlightenment,  a  characteristic  of  the  decadent 
morality. 

Nor  can  the  true  Puritan  be  reached  by  criti- 
cism. As  the  custodian  of  the  secret  of  holi- 
ness, the  seeker  after  heavenly  glory,  though  his 
feet  be  torn  and  bruised  by  the  flints  and  thorns 
of  the  narrow  way,  to  admit  criticism  of  method 
or  final  aim  would  be  to  admit  defeat  through 


PURITAJSTISM   AND  ASCETICISM  113 

the  fathomless  tragedy  of  misdirected  effort. 
Only  great  souls  could  have  the  courage  to  do 
this,  and  great  souls  are  no  longer  Puritans.  It 
cannot  be  supposed,  therefore,  that  the  ethical 
creed  of  Puritanism  will  ever  be  voluntarily  sub- 
mitted by  its  present  day  adherents  to  critical 
revision.  Nor  even  that  the  inveterate  habit  of 
its  attempted  imposition  upon  others  will  ever  be 
abandoned  by  them.  Only  can  we  hope  that  the 
number  of  these  adherents  will  grow  ever  less 
and  less  until  Puritanism  ceases  to  be  a  factor 
in  modern  life,  has,  indeed,  given  full  place  to  a 
newer  and  more  perfect  moral  system.  Not  to 
futile  argument  with  the  prepossessions  of  age 
and  provincialism,  nor  to  a  criticism  which  must 
fall  pointless  before  the  unassailable  armour  of 
self-righteousness,  can  we  look  for  emancipation, 
but  rather  to  youth,  to  the  East,  to  the  dawn. 


CHAPTER  VI 

PURITANISM   AND  THE  PROLETARIAT 

As  in  the  heart  of  the  feudal  world  the  trading 
class  gradually  arose,  bringing  with  it  a  new  in- 
dustrial system,  new  social  forms  and  new  moral 
conceptions,  so  in  the  modern  world  of  capital- 
ism, born  of  the  capitalist  system  itself  and 
growing  with  its  growth,  a  new  industrial  and 
social  class  arises,  bearing  with  it  new  ideas  of 
social  organization,  new  aims,  new  ideals,  the 
harbingers  of  capitalistic  overthrow.  This  new 
class  is  the  proletariat — the  working  class,  not  in 
its  broad  historic  aspect,  but  as  modified  to  the 
peculiar  forms  of  capitalistic  exploitation.  The 
chattel  slave  had,  in  his  day,  been  property,  and 
as  property  a  reciprocal  obligation  existed  be- 
tween him  and  his  master  that  he  should  labor, 
indeed,  but  that  he  should  also  receive  support. 
Even  when  incapacitated  from  labor  his  right  to 
support  persisted  and  constituted  for  him  an  as- 
surance of  access  to  the  means  of  life,  the  sem- 
blance of  a  property  right.  With  the  serf,  this 
assurance  of  access  to  the  means  of  production 
and  the  consequent  certainty  of  a  livelihood  was 
even  greater  and  more  secure.  The  serf  was 
114 


PURITANISM   AND  THE   PROLETARIAT         115 

not  only,  in  a  qualified  degree,  property,  but  as  a 
condition  of  his  status  he  also  had  property.  If 
the  serf  went  hungry  it  was  only  because  there 
was  famine  in  the  land,  never  because  of  some 
intricate  maladjustment  of  his  social  relations 
which  cut  him  off  from  food  in  a  time  of  plenty. 
But  when,  for  purposes  of  capitalist  industry, 
the  serf  was  "freed,"  the  chief  practical  result 
of  this  freedom  was  that  he  was  stripped,  that 
is,  "freed"  in  a  decidedly  sinister  sense,  from 
precisely  this  sure  access  to  the  means  of  pro- 
duction and  his  consequent  security  of  liveli- 
hood. Stripped  of  property  rights,  "freed"  from 
the  land  that  was  their  guaranty  of  a  living,  the 
serf  and  peasant  assumed  that  propertiless  char- 
acter which  marked  their  entire  severance  from 
the  means  of  production  and  constituted  them 
true  proletarians.  Henceforth  "free"  labor  could 
live  only  at  the  mercy  of  some  employer  and  on 
such  terms  as  the  employer  chose  to  grant.  The 
new  capitalist  class,  monopolizing  all  the  instru- 
mentalities of  production  and  engrossing  all  op- 
portunities of  employment,  stood,  an  insurmount- 
able barrier,  between  the  propertiless  worker 
and  the  means  of  life,  through  which  he  could 
pass  only  in  accordance  with  the  terms  of  the 
"free"  wage  contract  dictated  by  the  employer. 
To  this  contract  he  must  submit  or  starve.  The 


116  PURITANISM 

shackles  of  implacable  economic  necessity  held 
him  bound  in  the  toils  of  the  new  slavery  far 
more  firmly  than  the  iron  chains  which  clanked 
upon  the  limbs  of  the  chattel  slave.  These 
might  be  broken  and  escaped.  Economic  neces- 
sity, the  gnawings  of  hunger,  the  chill  of  winter 
winds,  cannot  be  escaped. 

Torn  from  the  soil,  hurled  in  vast  masses  into 
the  new  urban  centers  of  production  by  the  exi- 
gent demands  of  industry,  the  "freed"  laborers 
found  themselves  compacted  into  a  ghastly  fed- 
eration of  misery  by  the  sheer  force  of  the 
novel  industrial  processes.  For  the  factory  sys- 
tem and  the  later  machine  industry  required 
'"hands,"  not  the  single  deft  pair  of  the  indi- 
vidual craftsman,  but  hands  in  multitude,  carry- 
ing forward  in  a  collective  mass  the  complex 
processes  of  production,  so  that  the  men  them- 
selves became  at  length  symbolized  as  "hands." 
Propertiless,  cut  off  from  independent  resources, 
individually  helpless  under  the  will  of  the  "boss," 
the  very  coercion  of  their  impotence  and 
wretchedness  forced  upon  these  "freed"  laborers 
the  principle  of  mutual  association  and  aid.  This 
principle,  which,  more  than  any  other,  far  more 
than  the  famed  "struggle  for  existence,"  has  been 
the  dynamic  of  evolutionary  progress,  is  always 
the  ultimate  refuge  of  those  whose  case  is  des- 


PURITANISM  AND  THE  PROLETARIAT        117 

perate.  For  the  proletariat  it  is  the  secret  of 
salvation.  Manifesting  itself  in  the  trade  union, 
in  co-operative  industry,  and,  politically,  in  the 
international  socialist  movement,  it  forms  the 
basis  of  that  strength,  the  source  of  that  educa- 
tion, the  inspiration  of  that  devotion,  which  are 
looked  to  to  attain  the  final  emancipation  of  the 
working  class  from  its  age  long  bondage.  And  in 
the  social  reconstruction  which  shall  proclaim 
the  accomplishment  of  that  emancipation,  it  is, 
again,  this  principle  which  shall  form  the  frame- 
work and  guide  the  destinies  of  the  new  society. 
Nor  will  the  aim  of  this  new  society  be  like  that 
of  any  previous  order  of  civilization.  No  longer 
will  the  social  purpose  lie  in  the  accumulation  of 
wealth  or  the  maintenance  of  class  dominance, 
but  rather  in  a  conscious,  intelligent  collabora- 
tion with  nature  in  the  long  upward  trend  of  evo- 
lutionary development  toward  the  ideal  of  human 
perfection.  How  little  significance  for  this  new- 
visioned  proletariat  the  old  morality  may  have, 
is  manifest. 

The  economic  virtues  which  formed  the  sub- 
stance of  Puritan  morality  depicted  with  entire 
accuracy  the  class  interests  of  the  bourgeoisie, 
and  in  a  larger  way  were  consonant  with  the 
historic  purpose  of  accumulation,  that  sad  but 
necessary  episode  in  human  progress,  which  the 


1 18  PURITANISM 

annals  of  that  class  divulge.  But  in  a  narrower 
and  more  concrete  sense,  from  the  proletarian 
standpoint,  these  virtues  were  not  virtues  at  all, 
but  most  dangerous  and  pernicious  vices.  The 
reason  is  simple.  The  wealth  which  these  vir- 
tues helped  the  bourgeoisie  to  gain,  was  wealth 
accumulated  from  the  unrecompensed  labor  of 
the  proletariat.  Thrift,  frugality,  abstinence, 
prudence,  industry,  simplicity,  when  practiced  by 
the  worker,  redounded  not  at  all  to  his  benefit 
but  only  enriched  his  master.  Each  of  these, 
representing  the  deprivation  of  material  neces- 
sities and  comforts,  the  consequent  impairment 
of  vitality,  and  the  sacrifice  of  pleasure,  ease  and 
gladness,  and  of  intellectual  and  spiritual 
growth,  was,  for  the  worker  a  gratuitous  self- 
abnegation  the  profit  of  which,  whether  present 
or  remote,  lay  in  the  coffer  of  his  employer.  For 
by  the  practice  of  these  "virtues"  the  worker 
voluntarily  lowered  his  standard  of  living,  thus 
inviting  a  reduction  of  wages — an  invitation 
which  the  master  enthusiastically  accepted.  Sell- 
ing his  labor  in  a  highly  competitive  market  in 
which  the  lowest  bidder  got  the  job,  the  worker 
had  no  means  of  keeping  the  profit  of  these  vir- 
tues for  himself.  For  him  any  lessening  of  con- 
sumption, any  sacrific  of  leisure,  was  a  complete 
and  irreparable  loss.  That  here  and  there  an 


PURITANISM  AND  THE  PROLETARIAT         119 

exceptionally  shrewd  and  capable  worker  suc- 
ceeded, by  the  practice  of  these  virtues,  in  real- 
izing a  small  secret  hoard  by  which  he  was 
eventually  able  to  lift  himself  out  of  his  class 
into  the  ranks  of  capital,  argues  nothing  here, 
since  we  are  now  concerned  not  with  the  excep- 
tion but  the  rule.  And  the  rule  is  that  the  prac- 
tice of  these  virtues  was  and  is  an  obvious  and 
indisputable  detriment  to  the  working  class.  Nor 
is  the  case  helped  by  the  fact  that  in  the  ab- 
stract, and  apart  from  the  collisions  of  antagonis- 
tic class  interests,  certain  of  these  virtues  might, 
if  not  pressed  to  excess,  be  good,  or  be  matters 
of  ethical  indifference.  The  value  of  virtues 
must  be  estimated,  not  by  their  abstract  content, 
but  by  their  practical  effect  when  operating  in 
society  as  it  is.  Nor,  again,  is  it  material  that 
the  free  lands  of  the  frontier,  or  the  trade  union, 
or  the  unexampled  productivity  of  modern  meth- 
ods of  production,  have  tended  to  modify  the 
rigor  of  the  "iron  law"  of  wages,  or  to  elevate 
in  some  degree  the  laborer's  standard  of  living. 
It  still  remains  true  that  the  practice  of  the 
Puritan  economic  virtues  by  the  laborer  amounts 
to  a  voluntary  relinquishment,  pro  tanto,  of  that 
standard.  For  the  laborer,  under  the  circum- 
stances of  capitalistic  exploitation,  these  eco- 
nomic "virtues"  are  wholly  evil. 


120  PURITANISM 

But  if  the  economic  virtues  of  Puritanism  are 
pernicious  to  the  worker,  the  servile  virtues  espe- 
cially designed  for  his  guidance  and  correction, 
are  deadly.  That  the  propertiless,  impoverished 
proletarian,  condemned  to  a  life  of  devitalizing 
physical  drudgery  and  intellectual  blight  and 
disintegration,  should  be  taught  patience,  humil- 
ity, contentment,  is  surely  absurd  enough.  That 
he  should  believe  and  follow  such  teachings  is 
monstrous.  Yet  the  vast  and  crucial  importance 
to  the  bourgeoisie  of  the  practice  of  these  vir- 
tues by  the  workers  is  plain  enough,  and  the  in- 
dustry, skill  and  adroitness  with  which  they  have 
been  inculcated  by  press  and  pulpit  and  school, 
even  while  arousing  indignation,  challenges  ad- 
miration. One  of  the  latest  and  most  thoroughly 
characteristic  measures  devised  for  the  propaga- 
tion of  these  virtues  is  the  "boy  scout"  movement, 
where,  under  pretense  of  getting  the  pale,  anemic 
children  of  the  city  workers  out  into  the  woods 
and  fields,  the  old  anesthetics  of  loyalty,  rever- 
ence, obedience,  and  the  rest  are  duly  adminis 
tered.  For  the  proletarian,  each  particular  one  in 
the  long  catalogue  of  the  servile  virtues — pa- 
tience, humility,  contentment,  loyalty,  reverence, 
obedience,  respect  for  law,  the  hope  of  reward 
after  death — is  a  most  contemptible,  demoralizing 
and  destructive  vice.  Each  one  is  the  dastardly 


PURITANISM  AND  THE  PROLETARIAT        121 

betrayal  of  every  interest,  whether  of  person  or 
of  class,  which  the  worker  can  possess.  Every 
instinct  of  self-preservation,  of  love  of  family, 
of  class  solidarity,  demands  the  repudiation  of 
this  base,  treacherous  and  ridiculous  ethic.  For 
the  worker,  not  patience  but  a  consuming  impa- 
tience with  wrong  and  injustice,  not  humility  but 
defiance,  not  contentment  but  burning  discontent, 
not  loyalty  to  the  employer  or  constituted  author- 
ity but  loyalty  only  to  class  interest,  not  rever- 
ence but  insolence,  not  obedience  but  rebellion, 
are  the  true  virtues.  Through  these  only  can  he 
realize  such  manhood  as  may  be  in  him,  by  these 
alone  can  he  hope  for  liberation  from  his  eco- 
nomic bondage.  Nor  will  the  worker,  if  he  be 
less  than  imbecile,  be  longer  tricked  and  fooled 
by  the  hypocritical  promise  of  a  compensation 
beyond  the  grave,  for  the  labor  and  privation  of 
his  earthly  existence.  Rather  he  will  emulate  the 
courage  of  his  exploiters  who  cheerfully  run  the 
risk  of  eternal  damnation  if  they  may  have  a 
riotous  abundance  of  good  things  in  this  life. 
Cant  of  this  sort  is,  indeed,  becoming  encourag- 
ingly rare,  and  a  healthy  spirit  of  critical  in- 
quiry, of  independence  and  insubordination,  is 
spreading  amongst  the  proletariat. 

The  improvement  in  the  technique  of  indus- 
try, which  is  the  fundamental  dynamic  of  social 


122  PURITANISM 

change,  has  proceeded  from  the  simple  hand  in- 
dustry of  the  single  craftsman,  through  the  in- 
creased division  of  labor  of  the  factory  system, 
to  the  collective  machine  industry  of  today. 
Modern  production  is  carried  forward  in  great 
plants,  full  of  mighty  and  complex  machinery, 
operated  by  thousands  of  workers  whose  labor 
is  co-ordinated  into  one  vast  engine  of  manufac- 
ture. Upon  the  continued  operation  of  these 
giant  plants,  sometimes  constituting  an  entire 
city,  not  only  the  workers  but  the  public  at  large 
depend  for  subsistence.  The  private  ownership 
of  this  vast  social  enginery  of  production,  and  its 
use  for  purposes  of  private  aggrandizement,  is 
today  clearly  seen  to  be  a  vicious  and  indefen- 
sible anachronism.  Ownership  must  follow  use 
and  assume  a  public  and  collective  character. 
With  the  public  ownership  of  the  means  of  pro- 
duction, the  capitalist  class  will  be  stripped  of  its 
powers  of  exploitation,  will  lapse  and  merge  into 
the  general  body  of  workers,  class  distinctions 
will  cease,  the  long  and  bitter  struggle  between 
proprietor  and  worker,  between  oppressor  and 
oppressed,  with  its  horid  story  of  ages  of  vio- 
lence, cruelty  and  misery,  will  come  to  an  end, 
and  human  society  will  once  again,  as  in  the 
dim  ages  of  primitive  culture,  become  homogene- 
ous, stable  and  at  peace.  In  this  reconstructed 


PURITANISM    AND  THE   PROLETARIAT         123 

world,  it  is  manifests  the  old  ethics,  born  of  class 
struggles  and  designed  to  minister  to  and  pro- 
mote class  supremacy,  will  have  lost  all  service 
and  significance,  will  have  ceased  to  answer  any 
human  need  or  render  any  aid  to  human  prog- 
ress. Growing  out  of  the  new  industrial  sys- 
tem of  co-operative  labor,  supporting  its  organi- 
zation and  mirroring  its  ideals,  will  come  a  new 
ethic,  formulated  by  the  workers,  the  logical  de- 
velopment of  the  working-class  aspirations  of  to- 
day, in  which  but  faint  trace  of  present  day 
canons  of  moral  conduct  are  likely  to  be  found. 
Let  us  look  for  a  moment  at  what  we  may  fairly 
take  to  be  the  promised  ingredients  of  this  new 
morality. 

Emerging  from  uncounted  centuries  of  exploi- 
tation, it  goes  without  saying  that  the  emanci- 
pated working  class  will  regard  parasitism,  the 
appropriation  of  the  product  of  others'  labor 
without  just  and  complete  recompense,  as  a  most 
despicable  offense.  While  those  who  are  physi- 
cally or  mentally  incapacitated  for  labor,  whether 
by  youth  or  age  or  invalidism  or  otherwise,  will 
unquestionably  receive  to  the  full  that  care  and 
nurture  to  which  all  dictates  of  human  feeling 
entitle  them,  the  wilful  idler  who  refuses  or 
fails  to  bear  his  fair  proportion  of  the  social 
labor,  the  shirker,  the  beggar,  the  sponge,  will 


124  PURITANISM 

doubtless  be  looked  upon  as  a  social  pariah  and 
outcast.  The  nobility  of  useful  labor,  which  to- 
day in  the  mouths  of  the  paid  retainers  of  the 
idle  exploiting  class  is  merely  a  windy  hypoc- 
risy, will  in  the  new  society  become  a  pregnant 
truth.  The  old  identification  of  labor  with  ser- 
vility and  exploitation,  and  with  the  ignorance, 
feebleness,  and  poverty  of  the  working  class, 
having  lost  its  validity,  and  labor,  either  of  hand 
or  brain,  furnishing  the  only  avenue  to  personal 
independence,  it  follows  that  the  due  performance 
of  labor  will  be  a  source  of  pride,  the  necessary 
price  of  the  respect  of  one's  fellows,  while  the 
needless  acceptance  of  an  unearned  bounty,  such 
as  marks  the  idle  rich  of  our  time,  will  carry 
with  it  the  stigma  of  general  contempt.  Even 
now  this  sentiment  exists,  in  rather  vague  and 
rudimentary  form,  in  the  ranks  of  the  prole- 
tariat and,  indeed,  amongst  the  entire  mass  of 
common  people,  side  by  side  with  that  quite  op- 
posite sentiment,  the  sycophantic  reverence  of  the 
rich.  With  the  disappearance  of  private  incomes 
derived  merely  from  proprietorship,  and  of  the 
power  and  place  which  private  wealth  confers, 
reverence  for  the  rich,  however,  like  reverence 
for  the  god  Thoth,  will  become  a  matter  simply 
of  antiquarian  interest,  and  respect  for  those 
who  do  their  meed  of  useful  labor,  and  aversion 


PURITANISM   AND  THE  PROLETARIAT         125 

for  those  who  do  not,  will  become  the  just  rule 
of  social  valuations. 

From  the  interdependence  occasioned  by  the 
division  of  labor,  and  intensified  for  the  prole- 
tariat not  only  by  intimate  personal  association 
in  industry  but  also  by  the  deeper  fellowship  of 
a  common  oppression,  exploitation,  injustice  and 
misery,  arises  that  sense  of  mutual  dependence 
and  identity  of  interest,  and  that  quickened  sym- 
pathy, which  are  beautifully  summed  up  in  the 
one  word,  "brotherhood."  Nor  is  this  principle 
of  brotherhood  marred  for  the  proletariat,  as  it 
unavoidably  is  for  the  bourgeoisie,  by  the  clash 
of  personal  interests  and  the  personal  rivalries, 
jealousies  and  hostilities  arising  from  private 
possessions  and  the  competitive  system  of  pro- 
duction and  exchange.  Held  upon  an  approxi- 
mately dead  level  of  a  common  poverty,  which 
can  be  alleviated  only  by  the  actual  practice  of 
mutual  aid,  that  is,  of  brotherhood,  the  prole- 
tariat finds  itself  schooled  by  the  very  circum- 
stances of  its  origin  and  existence  in  that  lofty 
idealism  of  love  and  sacrifice  which  was  first 
formulated  and  taught  as  the  vital  principle  of 
the  conduct  of  life  by  the  Carpenter  of  Naza- 
reth. And  it  is  upon  the  principle  of  brother- 
hood, in  practical  realization  of  the  altruism  of 
Christ's  teaching,  that  the  new  society  will  be 


126  PURITANISM 

founded.  In  fact,  the  system  of  co-operative  in- 
dustry, based  upon  the  collective  ownership  of 
the  means  of  production,  involving  the  disap- 
pearance of  economic  classes  and  class  antago- 
nisms, is  the  only  social  form  in  which  the  true 
spirit  of  Christianity  can  prevail  amongst  men  or 
become  the  practical  guide  of  life.  To  importune 
men  to  follow  the  gospel  of  Jesus  in  a  capitalistic 
society  is  to  beseech  them  to  accomplish  the 
.  impossible.  But  in  the  reconstructed  society,  the 
realization  of  the  inspired  vision  of  the  "kingdom 
of  God"  which  charmed  the  rapt  sight  of  the 
great  Jewish  seer,  will  depend  upon  no  sickly 
sentiment,  or  twinge  of  a  not  fully  indurated  con- 
science, but  being  implicit  in  the  industrial  sys- 
tem itself,  will  be  interwoven  in  the  very  warp 
and  woof  of  the  social  organization.  Nor  will 
the  practice  of  brotherhood  be  limited  by  age 
or  race  or  nationality  or  sex  or  faith.  Even  to- 
day the  advance  of  capitalist  industry  tends 
more  and  more  to  eliminate  national  boundaries, 
to  amalgamate  all  races  of  the  earth  into  a  com- 
mon humanity,  and  to  place  women  upon  a  plane 
of  economic  independence  equal  with  men.  In 
the  co-operative  commonwealth  these  tendencies 
will  work  out  to  full  fruition.  And  with  the 
final  emancipation  of  women  from  economic  de- 
pendence upon  men,  and  their  admission  to  equal 


PURITANISM    AND  THE   PROLETARIAT         127 

copartnership  in  the  conduct  and  rewards  of  in- 
dustry, prostitution,  that  haunting  shadow  of 
civilization,  must  finally  and  forever  disappear. 
But,  further,  in  the  light  of  the  revelations  of 
biological  science  as  to  the  essential  unity  of  all 
living  organisms  and  of  the  similarity  of  sense 
and  structure  between  man  and  all  of  the  bright, 
darting,  bounding,  beautiful  creatures  of  air  and 
land  and  sea,  the  practice  of  brotherhood  can- 
not even  be  narrowed  to  the  confines  of  human- 
ity but  must  be  extended,  in  exquisite  sympathy, 
tenderness  and  protection  to  the  whole  animal 
world.  The  old  theological  deduction  that  be- 
cause these  little  furred  and  feathered  cousins 
were  supposedly  without  souls,  therefore  they 
might  virtuously  be  given  over  to  the  careless 
indifference  or  savage  cruelty  of  man,  has,  for- 
tunately, been  forever  exploded  by  the  advance  of 
scientific  research.  Nor  is  this  the  only  instance 
in  which  science  has  furnished  us  with  a  far 
nobler  ethic  than  has  religious  dogma. 

The  ownership  of  property  confers  political 
power.  Conversely,  property  must  always  at- 
tach to  itself  political  power  to  insure  its  own 
preservation.  In  a  class  society,  therefore, 
founded  upon  the  private  ownership  of  the  means 
of  production,  the  form  of  government,  what- 
ever may  be  its  theoretical  exposition,  must 


128  PURITANISM 

always  be  in  fact  either  an  oligarchy  or  an  autoc- 
racy, from  participation  in  which  the  properti- 
less  masses  are  excluded.  But  with  the  abroga- 
tion of  the  institution  of  private  property  in  the 
means  of  life,  and  the  consequent  relative  equal- 
ity in  ownership  which  follows  therefrom,  the 
only  feasible  governmental  form  is  that  of  a 
pure  democracy.  The  improvement  and  exten- 
sion of  the  means  of  intercommunication  enable 
this  form  to  be  applied  over  an  indefinite  area 
and  to  embrace  widely  separated  and  divergent 
groups.  But  democracy  is  something  more  than 
a  mere  governmental  form.  Just  as  the  class  or- 
ganization of  society  engenders  a  patrician  spirit 
which  reacts  powerfully  upon  all  social  institu- 
tions, ethics,  manners,  art,  social  conventions,  so 
the  democratic  spirit,  the  spirit  of  equality,  with 
its  demeanor  of  personal  independence  and  dig- 
nity, its  respect  and  consideration  for  others, 
its  intrinisc  candor,  fairness  and  justness,  its 
comradery  and  good  will,  must  infuse  these 
social  institutions  and  remold  them  into  its  own 
likeness.  With  the  disappearance  of  class  dis- 
tinctions and  of  their  concomitant  habits  of 
mind,  will  go  arrogance,  pride  of  place,  patron- 
age, on  the  one  hand,  and  sycophancy,  servility, 
and  shame  of  place,  upon  the  other.  This  is  not, 
of  course,  to  say  that  the  new  society  will  not 


PURITANISM   AND  THE   PROLETARIAT         129 

have  its  men  of  exceptional  ability,  its  acknowl- 
edged geniuses  and  leaders,  whom  it  will  appro- 
priately honor ;  but  with  the  abolition  of  the  pure- 
ly adventitious  superiorities  of  income-producing 
wealth,  the  man  of  inherently  superior  powers 
will  personally  earn  his  position  by  holding  his 
gifts  at  the  service  of  all.  The  "superman"  who 
should  dedicate  his  unusual  prowess  to  his  pri- 
vate aggrandizement,  would  meet  with  short 
shrift  before  the  combined  power  of  the  whole, 
intimate,  human  association. 

Freed  from  the  privation  of  millenniums  of 
unrequited  toil,  with  the  wealth  and  wonders  of 
the  world  at  its  command,  it  is  fairly  certain 
that  the  emancipated  working  class,  still  wan 
from  its  centuries  of  service  and  sacrifice,  will 
take  great  joy  in  repudiating,  finally  and  for- 
ever, the  fallacies  and  aberrations  of  asceticism. 
Whatever  may  be  the  future  attitude  towards 
religious  faith  as  determined  by  science  and  phi- 
losophy working  together,  it  is  clear  that  the  silly 
notion  of  attaining  spiritual  perfection  through 
the  denial  of  life,  the  courtship  of  physical  death, 
must  be  relegated  to  the  limbo  of  barbarian 
superstitions.  Not  the  denial  of  life,  but  the  lau- 
dation and  triumph  of  life  will  be  the  keynote  of 
the  new  ethics.  The  lusts  of  the  flesh,  the  lusts 
of  the  eye,  and  the  pride  of  life,  will  become 


130  •         PURITANISM 

sacred  formulas,  holy  and  pure  in  the  light  of 
the  perfect  development  of  the  whole  man,  and 
of  all  men,  to  which  the  race  will  dedicate  itself. 
Whatever  may  be  the  hidden  destiny  of  those 
who  pass  from  mortal  sight  through  the  low 
portal  of  the  grave,  it  is  certain  that  the  best  and 
only  sure  preparation  for  that  exit  lies  in  the 
exhaustion  of  all  life's  experiences,  the  fulfill- 
ment of  all  life's  possibilities.  The  fasts  and 
vigils,  the  sexual  repressions,  the  spiritual  wres- 
tlings, agonies  and  ecstasies,  the  morbid  introspec- 
tion and  meticulous  casuistry,  of  the  ascetic  and 
mystic  are,  fortunately,  exercises  in  which  the 
working  class  has  had  scant  time  or  humor  for 
indulgence.  All  this  rubbish  will  be  swept  away 
by  the  sane  and  healthy  interpretation  of  nature 
which  science  has  made  possible.  But  this  does 
not  mean  that  humanity  will  lapse  into  a  quag- 
mire of  abnormal  sensuality.  Such  a  condition 
is  possible  only  where  there  is  no  work  to  do, 
where  unearned  wealth  or  irremediable  pauper- 
ism enervate  and  corrupt  the  soul.  In  the  new 
society  leisure  will  be  but  the  well  earned  recom- 
pense of  labor,  the  time  for  expanding  knowl- 
edge and  recruiting  strength.  The  uncompre- 
hended  infinite  possibilities  of  science,  the  even 
vaster  potentialities  of  artistic  creation,  the  pro- 
fundities of  philosophy,  the  worship  and  pursuit 


PURITANISM    AND  THE   PROLETARIAT         131 

of  beauty  and  joy,  the  final  conquest  and  com- 
mand of  the  phenomenal  world,  all  these  avenues 
of  effort  and  storehouses  of  things  accomplished 
will  be  opened  to  all  mankind,  wherein  each  may 
labor  and  garner  as  he  will.  Sanity  and  health, 
reason  and  experiment,  the  natural  instincts  and 
desires,  labor  and  rest,  achievement  and  service — 
these,  with  the  ever  present  and  ever  increasing 
illumination  of  man's  pathway  by  the  clear  light 
of  science,  will  be  the  guides  to  right  conduct, 
the  tests  of  successful  living. 

With  the  establishment  of  co-operative  indus- 
try, and  the  consequent  economic  dependence  of 
each  individual  upon  the  successful  carrying  for- 
ward of  the  collective  labors,  will  come  a  pro- 
found change  in  the  sense  and  estimate  of  pub- 
lic obligation.  Under  the  capitalist  regime  the 
state,  indeed,  is  but  another  of  the  many  agencies 
for  supporting  class  supremacy,  and  has  been 
well  characterized  as  the  "executive  committee" 
of  the  ruling  class.  But  the  state,  also,  through 
its  powers  of  taxation,  has  been  made  to  operate 
as  a  direct  agency  for  the  accumulation  of  wealth 
which  was  later  appropriated  by  the  capitalist 
oligarchy  for  whose  benefit  the  state  was  main- 
tained. The  public  treasury  is,  therefore,  looked 
upon  as  the  legitimate  object  of  loot,  contracts 
with  the  public  are  but  the  formal  means  of 


132  PURITANISM 

plunder,  and  civic  obligation  consists  chiefly,  for 
the  bourgeois  citizen,  in  "getting  his."  But  with 
the  assumption  by  the  public  of  the  general  busi- 
ness of  production  and  distribution,  the  state  will 
lose  its  character  as  an  instrument  of  repression, 
political,  class  government  as  we  know  it  today 
will  disappear,  and  the  state  will  become  instead 
the  general  agency  of  industrial  and  social  ad- 
ministration, the  organic  expression  of  the  collec- 
tive will,  in  the  due  and  successful  operation  of 
which  every  citizen  will  be  immediately  and  vital- 
ly interested.  Robbery  of  the  public,  under  these 
circumstances,  instead  of  being  condoned  as  at 
present  as  at  most  a  venial  transgression,  will  be 
deemed  one  of  the  worst  of  crimes,  since  it  would 
no  longer  buttress  the  existing  order,  but  would 
disintegrate  and  destroy  it.  With  the  advent  of 
collectivism  may  be  expected  the  development  of 
that  civic  conscience  which  present-day  reformers 
have  verbally  anticipated.  The  discharge  of  pub- 
lic obligations  will  become  but  a  part  of  the 
daily  labor,  a  feature  of  the  common  routine. 
The  sacredness  of  private  obligation,  which  is 
featured  as  an  item  in  bourgeois  commercial  mor- 
ality, will  suffer  dilution  as  private  obligations 
themselves  become  trivial  and  unimportant,  while 
the  sacredness  of  public  duty  will  be  increasingly 
recognized  as  public  duties  become  paramount. 


PURITANISM    AND  THE   PROLETARIAT         133 

The  question  of  the  status  of  marriage  in  the 
new  society  is  one  of  extreme  importance  since 
it  is  here  that  reactionaries  of  all  sorts  center 
their  opposition  to  social  reconstruction.  It  is 
both  idle  and  disingenuous  to  assert  that  marriage 
as  a  legal  and  civil  institution  is  not  likely  to 
undergo  profound  modification.  In  two  respects, 
at  least,  the  present  foundations  of  the  institu- 
tion will  unquestionably  undergo  grave  changes. 
First,  with  the  abolition  of  private  income-pro- 
ducing wealth,  the  vanishing  of  economic  classes, 
and  the  lapse  of  the  right  of  inheritance  (except 
as  to  mere  personal  mementos),  it  is  clear  that 
marriage  will  forever  lose  its  character  as  an  in- 
strumentality for  the  preservation  from  age  to 
age  of  class  dominance.  The  artificial  perpetua- 
tion of  the  marriage  tie,  therefore,  in  the  face  of 
the  disinclination  of  the  parties  involved  to  con- 
tinue the  relation,  will  cease  to  be  a  matter  of 
public  concern,  or  the  occasion  of  state  interfer- 
ence. The  dissolution  of  the  marriage  relation 
will  become  as  purely  a  personal  and  private  af- 
fair as  is  the  assumption  of  the  relation  now. 
Some  sort  of  registration  may  be  required  for 
the  purpose  of  vital  statistics,  but  the  disgrace- 
ful, brutal  and  demoralizing  divorce  trials  of  our 
own  day  will  become  but  evil  memories  of  the 
past.  Nor  will  this  relegation  of  the  termination 


134  PURITANISM 

of  the  marriage  relation  to  private  choice  do 
violence  to  the  rights  and  safety  of  the  progeny  of 
the  marriage.  Aside  from  the  question  whether 
the  interests  of  the  children  themselves  are  not 
better  subserved  by  a  separation  of  parents  who 
have  grown  distasteful  to  each  other  and  whose 
continued  association  could  be  productive  of 
nothing  but  wrangling,  ill-temper  and  mutual 
hatred  and  contempt,  creating  an  atmosphere 
which  is  hardly  ideal  for  child  culture,  it  is  prob- 
able that  the  public  will  assume,  through  public 
nurseries,  creches,  kindergartens,  schools,  play- 
grounds, medical  supervision,  children's  hospitals 
and  the  like,  so  many  of  the  labors  of  child  nur- 
ture and  rearing,  that  even  the  loss  of  parental 
association,  where  such  became  imperative,  would 
have  far  less  ill  effects  than  the  reactionaries 
prefer  to  believe.  It  is  often  forgotten,  in  the 
heat  of  argument,  that  if  parental  nurture  is  to 
be  of  value,  the  parent  himself  must  be  fit  for  the 
obligations  of  the  family  association.  Of  course, 
too,  the  state  would  retain  and  probably  greatly 
increase  its  present  powers  of  supervision  over 
parental  custody  and  the  discharge  of  parental 
duties.  The  second  of  the  changes  in  the  founda- 
tion of  the  marriage  institution,  and  affecting,  in- 
deed, the  whole  matter  of  sex  relationship,  is  the 
economic  emancipation  of  women.  As  long 


PURITANISM   AND  THE  PROLETARIAT        135 

as  woman  is  economically  dependent  upon 
man,  as  long  as  she  derives  her  material 
necessities  through  him,  she  must  make 
of  her  sex  charms,  in  one  way  or  an- 
other, a  matter  of  merchandise.  Moreover, 
her  dependence  prevents  her  having  equal  voice 
either  in  the  assumption  of  the  marriage  relation 
or  its  termination.  Propriety  forbids  her  to  pro- 
pose it,  since  this  would  be  but  a  veiled  request 
for  material  support.  And  her  dependence  upon 
the  husband  often  leads  her  to  protract  the  rela- 
tion even  beyond  the  bounds  of  physical  endur- 
ance and  long  after  every  conceivable  considera- 
tion would  argue  its  severance.  But  with 
economic  freedom  assured  to  her  by  direct  and  in- 
defeasible access  to  the  means  of  production  and 
by  being  accorded  her  equal  and  independent 
place  in  the  business  of  the  collective  industry, 
all  this  will  be  changed.  Woman  will  exercise 
as  much  choice  and  initiative  in  the  assumption 
of  the  marital  status  as  man,  and  its  continuance 
will  be  quite  as  much  at  her  pleasure  as  his. 
Moreover,  freed  from  economic  constraint  and 
enabled  to  dictate  the  terms  upon  which  she  will 
submit  to  sexual  associations,  we  must  assume 
that  woman  will  abandon  the  promiscuity  of  pros- 
titution, unless,  indeed,  we  are  so  obsessed  by 
the  theological  dogma  of  original  sin  as  to  believe 


136  PURITANISM 

that  through  some  inherent  depravity  she  will 
prefer  an  abnormal  and  perverted  sexual  life. 
Besides,  it  is  probable  that,  instead  of  devoting 
its  energies  to  riveting  the  bonds  of  unendurable 
marriages,  the  state,  relegating  the  matter  of  di- 
vorce to  private  choice,  will  exercise  much  more 
care  than  at  present  to  aid  in  the  formation  of 
successful  marital  unions.  The  marriage  of  the 
physically  unfit  should  and  doubtless  will  be 
prohibited.  Adequate  instruction  of  the  young  in 
sexology,  eugenics  and  the  responsibilities  of 
parenthood,  and  the  general  elevation  of  person- 
al relationships  flowing  from  the  spirit  of  democ- 
racy and  the  practical  equality  of  the  sexes,  may 
be  expected  to  further  the  formation  of  success- 
ful and  happy  unions. 

But  the  old  dread  recurs.  With  the  loss  of 
the  economic  sanctions  for  monogamy,  will  not 
the  monogamous  marriage  itself  vanish  in  a 
vague  polygamy  or  a  general  and  irresponsible 
promiscuity,  and  will  not  the  institution  of  the 
family,  with  all  of  its  sacred  and  tender  associa- 
tions disappear?  For  the  broad  effect  of  the 
establishment  of  collective  industry  and  of  the 
abrogation  of  economic  class  distinctions  will  be 
that  the  sex  relation  will  be  purged  of  its  sordid 
economic  content  and  limitations.  No  longer 
will  the  desire  of  transmitting  private  wealth  and 


PURITANISM    AND  THE   PROLETARIAT         137 

aristocratic  position  to  a  restricted  and  definitely 
ascertained  progeny  actuate  the  man  in  enforcing 
monogamy  and  female  chastity,  since  neither  pri- 
vate wealth  nor  aristocratic  position  will  longer 
exist  for  transmission.  No  longer  will  the  wom- 
an's economic  dependence  constrain  her  to  sub- 
mit to  masculine  rule  in  the  regulation  of  the 
supremely  important  function  of  reproduction. 
What,  if  anything,  then,  remains  to  insure  a 
normal  reticence  and  restriction  in  sexual  indul- 
gence, a  responsible  parenthood,  and  an  orderly 
and  established  family  life  ?  Of  course,  this  ques- 
tion still  echoes  the  old  dogma  of  original  sin, 
still  assumes  that  without  artificial  restraint  man 
will  inevitably  plunge  into  limitless  depravity.  It 
might  be  sufficient  to  say  that  this  assumption  is 
itself  utterly  contradicted  by  the  long  epic  of 
human  progress  upward  from  the  brute,  and 
that  a  spiritual  aspiration  and  intellectual  in- 
genuity which  were  capable  of  creating  the  artifi- 
cial restraints  suggested  in  the  past  by  economic 
ends,  would,  when  these  had  lapsed,  be  equally 
capable  of  creating  newer  and  better  sanctions 
of  sexual  discipline.  We  may  also  pass  by  the 
suggestion  of  Engels  that  the  numerical  balance 
between  the  sexes  indicates  monogamy  as  the 
natural  form  of  marriage.  The  true  and  effec- 
tive answer  to  all  these  doubts  lies,  not  in  more 


138  PURITANISM 

or  less  futile  argumentation,  but  in  a  very  real 
and  positive  fact,  a  social  force  of  marvelous 
power  and  intensity  released  by  the  bourgeoisie 
itself.  This  is  the  passion  of  romantic  love. 

It  is  exceedingly  doubtful  if  romantic  love  was 
known  at  all  in  savagery,  and  even  in  the  stage  of 
barbaric  culture  it  seems  to  have  been  the  excep- 
tional experience  of  demi-gods  and  heroes.  In 
the  era  of  classic  antiquity  and  in  the  feudal  era 
romantic  love  figures  only  as  the  inspiration  of 
illicit  connections,  never  as  a  recognized  basis 
of  marriage.  Under  feudalism,  particularly,  ro- 
mantic love  and  adultery  were  indissolubly  bound 
up  together.  Feudal  marriages  were  concluded 
on  quite  other  grounds,  chiefly  the  amalgamation 
of  estates  and  the  increase  of  family  power  and 
prestige.  It  is  to  the  eternal  credit  of  the  bour- 
geoisie that  it  first  asserted  romantic  love  to  be 
the  ideal  basis  of  the  marital  union,  thus  legiti- 
mizing it  and  giving  it  a  valid  place  in  human 
experience.  But  the  bourgeoisie  has,  neverthe- 
less, always  been  prevented,  by  the  institution  of 
private  wealth,  from  realizing  this  ideal  in  actual 
practice.  Considerations  of  property,  of  posi- 
tion, of  class  distinctions,  have  persistently 
dulled  the  arrows  of  Eros  and  stained  his  wings 
with  earthly  dross.  The  typical  figure  in  bour- 
geois sentimental  tragedy  is  the  young  girl  whose 


PURITANISM   AND   THE   PROLETARIAT         139 

heart  is  torn  between  greed  for  wealth  and  ro- 
mantic love.  The  height  of  present-day  maga- 
zine romance  is  reached  when  the  young  girl  falls 
in  love  with  a  quite  unknown  young  man,  who, 
however,  must  eventually  turn  out  to  be  one  of 
her  own  class  and  station.  With  the  advent  of 
collective  industry,  and  the  vanishing  of  private, 
income-producing  wealth,  and  of  the  social  dis- 
tinctions it  creates,  it  is  plain  that  these  hin- 
drances to  the  full  play  and  consummation  of 
romantic  love  in  marriage  will  be  removed. 
Freed  from  her  long  economic  dependence  upon 
the  male,  woman  need  recognize  no  other  motive 
for  marriage  than  the  longings  of  her  heart. 
Romantic  love  must  become  not  only  the  supreme 
Lut  the  sole  occasion,  the  indispensable  justifica- 
tion, the  sacred  inspiration  of  the  union  of  the 
sexes.  And  romantic  love  is  essentially  and 
implacably  monogamous.  Moreover,  the  tie  cre- 
ated by  romantic  love  in  marriage  will  be  inten- 
sified by  the  very  fact  that  the  preservation  of 
the  marital  union  no  longer  depends  upon  the 
adventitious  aid  of  legal  or  economic  coercion, 
but  only  upon  that  fidelity,  considerateness, 
chivalry,  and  tender  devotion  which  preserve 
love  Itself.  Further,  with  a  methodical  sanity 
of  life  substituted  for  the  irregular,  dissolute, 
nerve-wracking  life  of  the  upper  classes  of  today, 


140  PURITANISM 

and  with  the  meager  and  cruelly  uncertain  sub- 
sistence of  the  poor  replaced  by  an  ample  and 
assured  livelihood,  most  of  the  occasions  of 
marital  unhappiness  and  disagreement,  most  of 
the  temptations  to  sexual  irregularities,  must  dis- 
appear. Far  from  collective  industry  destroying 
the  home  or  leading  to  animal  promiscuity  or  a 
carnival  of  licentiousness,  it  is  much  more  likely 
to  result  in  the  permanence  of  the  home,  the 
idealization  of  marriage,  the  cure  of  sexual 
abnormalities  and  perversions,  the  healthy,  intelli- 
gent and  general  fulfillment  of  the  duties  of  pro- 
creation, and  a  purification  of  the  moral  atmos- 
phere and  elevation  of  the  moral  tone  of  society 
at  large  which  will  be  immensely  refreshing  aftet 
the  aberrations  of  the  bourgeois  regime. 

As  has  been  the  case  with  all  other  moral  sys- 
tems, the  morality  of  the  new  society  will  be  en- 
forced by  the  pressure  of  public  opinion.  Bui 
in  addition  to  this,  as  the  co-operative  industr) 
which  will  form  the  basis  of  the  new  society  wil' 
render  that  society  homogeneous,  free  frorc 
classes  and  class  antagonisms,  and  will  directly 
involve  and  reflect,  in  its  successful  prosecution, 
the  interest  of  each  human  being,  a  new  motive 
for  conforming  both  to  the  ethical  and  jundjc'J 
regulations  of  the  new  order  will  be  fcarK?  '.c 
what  has  been  termed  "enlightened  self  i 


PURITANISM    AND  THE   PROLETARIAT         141 

Heretofore,  when  class  systems  of  morality  were 
concerned,  enlightened  self  interest  indeed  actu- 
ated the  master  class  in  conforming  to  the  pre- 
cepts of  their  moral  code,  since  by  doing  so  they 
promoted  their  class  interests  and  through  these 
their  private  welfare.  But  this  was  true  only  of 
the  masters.  The  enlightened  self  interest  of 
the  working  class,  had  there  been  such  a  thing, 
would  at  all  times  have  dictated  the  overthrow 
of  the  class  society,  and  incidentally  thereto  the 
painstaking  repudiation  of  the  class  morality  of 
the  proprietors  which  upheld  it.  That  this  was 
not  done  is  due  precisely  to  the  absence  amongst 
the  workers  of  any  clear  and  intelligent  under- 
standing of  their  own  interests,  and,  also,  of 
course,  to  the  great  difficulty  of  intercommunica- 
tion and  organization.  But  in  the  co-operative 
commonwealth,  the  termination  of  working  class 
exploitation  and  the  elimination  of  class  antago- 
nisms will  make  the  welfare  of  the  community 
and  the  promotion  of  the  social  order  the  mirror 
wherein  each  will  see  his  own  greatest  benefit. 
There  is,  perhaps,  a  third  motive  which  may 
operate  as  a  sanction  for  the  new  morality.  The 
mental  attitude  of  each  individual  is  largely  a 
reflection  of  the  opinions  and  emotions  of  those 
about  him.  Anger  begets  anger,  vengeance  be- 
gets enmity,  kindness  inspires  gratitude,  forgive- 


142  PURITANISM 

ness  occasions  repentance,  love  engenders  love. 
Even  the  most  hardened  sinner  responds  to  the 
touch  of  human  sympathy.  With  the  profounder 
understanding  of  the  psychology  of  the  trans- 
gressor which  the  study  of  crime  and  evil  as 
social  phenomena  brings,  the  passing  of  the  spirit 
of  vindictiveness  from  the  social  attitude  toward 
the  offender,  and  the  general  amelioration  both 
in  the  criminal  administration  and  in  the  subtler 
punishments  of  ostracism  and  contempt  which 
visit  moral  laxity,  it  is  not  too  much  to  expect 
that  a  corresponding  pliancy  and  amenability  to 
reformative  influences  will  be  developed  in  the 
breasts  of  the  erring  ones  themselves.  This  is, 
indeed,  one  of  the  most  insistent  teachings  of  the 
Christian  faith.  "Judge  not,  and  ye  shall  not  be 
judged :  condemn  not,  and  ye  shall  not  be  con- 
demned :  forgive,  and  ye  shall  be  forgiven :  give, 
and  it  shall  be  given  unto  you;  good  measure, 
pressed  down,  and  shaken  together,  and  running 
over,  shall  men  give  into  your  bosom.  For  with 
the  same  measure  that  ye  mete  withal  it  shall  be 
measured  to  you  again."  And  if,  as  has  been 
beautifully  said,  "To  understand  all,  is  to  for- 
give all,"  it  is  not  fantastic  to  hope  that  an 
assurance  of  material  safety  and  satisfaction 
which  will  make  the  predatory  impulse  no  longer 
conducive  to  self  preservation,  an  intelligent,  sci- 


PURITANISM   AND  THE  PROLETARIAT        143 

entific  and  tender  nurture  of  those  prone  to  err, 
and  a  boundless  and  inexhaustible  sympathy  and 
compassion,  may  yet  banish  evil  from  the  world. 


CHAPTER  VII 

ABSTRACT    MORALITY 

A  final  problem  remains  for  elucidation.  If, 
as  we  have  seen,  systems  of  morality  are  but  the 
reflections,  the  secondary  effects,  of  the  develop- 
ment of  industrial  technique  and  of  the  social 
order  which  in  any  given  age  grows  out  of  the 
stage  of  industrial  progress  then  reached,  and 
if  these  moral  systems  arise  and  decay  with  the 
changing  social  order  out  of  which  they  spring 
and  of  which  they  form  so  essential  and  char- 
acteristic a  part,  and  if,  moreover,  their  only 
sanction  lies  in  the  force  of  public  opinion  which 
itself  is  but  the  creature  of  the  moment,  the  mir- 
ror of  a  passing  necessity,  what,  then,  becomes  of 
the  claims  of  conscience,  of  ultimate  moral  obli- 
gation, or,  in  other  words,  why  should  any  one 
believe  himself  inwardly  constrained  to  a  course 
of  moral  conduct  at  all?  What  is  there  in  any 
given  order  of  society  which  can  successfully 
demand  the  allegiance  of  moral  observance,  and, 
if  one  chooses  to  pay  the  price  of  public  cen- 
sure, or  to  take  the  risk  of  successfully  conceal- 
ing his  offenses  and  so  escaping  it,  why  should 
he,  on  any  rational  ground,  hesitate,  or  experi- 
144 


ABSTRACT    MORALITY  145 

ence  a  conscientious  qualm,  before  anything  he 
may  be  inclined  to  do?  When  moral  precepts 
are  viewed  as  divine  commands,  they  find  an 
abstract  sanction  in  obedience  to  the  divine  will. 
When  they  are  viewed  as  principles  productive 
of  the  greatest  good  to  the  greatest  number,  or 
as  resulting  in  the  largest  sum  total  of  happi- 
ness, they  find  an  abstract  sanction  in  the  spirit 
of  benevolence  and  good  will.  But  what  abstract 
sanction  may  be  found  for  moral  precepts  which 
are  but  the  formal  rules  for  the  support  and 
maintenance  of  a  social  order  which  is  itself  only 
a  passing  phase  in  human  history,  which  is,  more 
often  than  not,  founded  upon  the  basic  injustice 
of  exploitation,  and  which,  if  we  be  of  the  work- 
ing class,  our  supreme  self-interest  would  lead 
us  to  overthrow?  Why,  for  instance,  should  a 
worker,  to  whom  the  institution  of  private  prop- 
erty in  the  means  of  life  is  the  very  term  and 
condition  of  slavery,  to  whom  the  social  order 
founded  upon  this  institution  is  a  veritable  living 
inferno,  and  to  whom  the  destruction  of  this 
institution  represents  the  only  hope  of  freedom 
— why  should  he  nevertheless  respect  private 
property  sufficiently  to  refrain  from  theft  or 
fraud?  Has  not  our  very  definition  of  morals 
shown  morality,  at  all  events  class  morality,  to 
be  but  a  superstition  and  delusion? 


146  PURITANISM 

The  problem  is  thus  variously  stated  in  order 
that  there  may  be  no  misunderstanding  of  its 
gravity  or  charge  that  it  has  not  been  frankly 
met.  Essentially,  the  problem  is  to  find  an  ulti- 
mate, abstract,  and  therefore  permanent  sanc- 
tion and  rational  justification  for  moral  con- 
duct, the  particular  rules  and  canons  of  which 
shift  and  change  from  age  to  age.  And  the 
answer  lies  in  the  change  itself,  in  the  fact  that 
it  is  not  a  meaningless  and  chaotic  catastrophe, 
but  a  part  of  a  systematic  and  orderly  evolution- 
ary progression. 

The  theory  of  evolution  has  touched  the  mind's 
eye  like  a  magic  ointment,  and  disclosed,  as  yet 
uncertainly  or  in  momentary  flashes,  a  vista  of 
cosmic  growth  so  transcendent  that  the  thought 
turns  from  it  appalled,  refusing  to  grasp  or 
measure  its  immensities.  The  imagination,  stim- 
ulated by  this  hypothesis,  dimly  discerns  the 
flaming  nebula,  rotating  in  the  dark  abysm  of 
space,  which,  uncounted  eons  ago,  summed  up 
the  promise  of  the  solar  system,  as  yet  unborn. 
Thence,  down  the  path  of  the  tireless  ages  it 
follows  the  slow  congealing  of  this  amorphous 
fire  mist  to  a  whirling  orb  surrounding  itself 
with  successive  rings  of  lagging  matter,  which 
in  turn  become  planets  developing  satellites  of 
their  own.  At  length  the  cosmic  lava  condenses 


ABSTRACT    MORALITY  147 

to  glowing  rock,  congealing  under  the  ocean  tor- 
rents which  pour  from  the  boiling  heavens.  Then 
the  waters  find  footing  in  the  scarred  and  black- 
ened gorges,  through  thin  rifts  in  the  fathomless 
mists  above  appear  faint  glimpses  of  the  sov- 
ereign father  of  all,  the  parent  sun,  and  in  the 
tepid  seas  the  first  faint  sparks  of  life,  organisms 
of  a  single  cell  too  minute  for  human  sight,  are 
mysteriously  engendered.  With  the  coming  of 
life  the  ground  clothes  itself  with  verdure,  land, 
air  and  sea  are  tremulous  with  living  forms,  and 
at  last,  as  the  product  of  this  titanic  drama, 
there  burns  along  the  pathway  of  the  sun  this 
exquisite  jewel  of  heaven,  our  mother,  the  earth, 
the  flashing  blue  of  her  oceans,  the  soft  green  of 
her  continents,  the  snowy  ermine  of  her  polar 
regions  giving  back  to  the  vast  and  vague  re- 
cesses of  space,  through  veiling  mists,  the  starry 
revealings  of  her  supernal  splendor.  But  the 
tale  which  evolution  has  to  tell  of  our  mother  is 
not  yet  ended.  From  history  it  passes  to  proph- 
ecy, a  prophecy  of  hoary  eld,  of  gaunt  lifeless 
lands  and  vanished  seas  and  the  clear  unutterable 
cold  of  space.  What  is  the  meaning  of  the 
colossal  tragedy?  We  do  not  know. 

Or  if  we  turn  to  the  story  of  life  upon  the 
earth  we  meet  again  the  same  broken  yet  preg- 
nantly suggestive  narrative  of  growth  and  change. 


148  PURITANISM 

These  microscopic  unicellular  organisms  of  the 
primeval  seas  begin  their  wonder-tale  of  slow  de- 
velopment. Through  the  countless  beautiful  and 
terrible  forms  of  life,  upward  to  man,  yea,  per- 
chance, beyond  man,  birth  upon  endless  birth,  the 
stupendous  fabric  of  the  organic  world  is 
wrought.  And  all  to  what  purpose?  We  do  not 
know.  Or,  again,  if  we  follow  the  development 
of  consciousness,  from  the  machine-like  tropic 
response  to  external  stimuli  of  the  simplest  or- 
ganisms, up  to  the  heaven  topping  creative 
genius  of  Phidias  or  Shakespeare,  the  same 
panorama  of  change  and  growth,  of  progression 
toward  some  unknown,  perhaps  inconceivable 
goal,  is  opened  before  us.  In  the  history  of  the 
development  of  human  society,  it  is  no  differ- 
ent. The  primitive  horde,  unorganized,  uncap- 
tained,  of  the  crudest,  most  remote  savagery, 
gives  way  to  the  gens  and  the  tribal  organization. 
Barbarian  culture  succeeds  to  savagery.  Then 
slavery  appears,  and  with  it  the  institution  of 
private  property,  the  territorial  state,  orderly 
government,  the  institution  of  kingship.  The  in- 
comparable triumphs  of  Greecian  art  and  litera- 
ture, as  well  as  the  grandiose  pageantry  and 
might  of  Rome,  rested  upon  the  scarred  back  and 
bowed  loins  of  the  chattel  slave.  Then  spreads 
before  us  the  feudal  world,  a  recrudescence  of 


ABSTRACT   MORALITY  149 

barbarism  superimposed  upon  the  antique  cul- 
ture, out  of  the  ruthless  warfare,  the  colorful 
life,  the  fantastic  thought,  the  romantic  spirit  of 
which,  modern  civilization  slowly  emerges.  Mod- 
ern civilization !  What  boasting  and  what  irony, 
what  wretchedness  and  what  hope,  resound  with- 
in the  phrase!  The  illumination  of  human  un- 
derstanding which  science  has  wrought,  the  mas- 
tery which  man  has  gained  over  the  adverse  con- 
ditions of  his  environment,  the  dominion  which 
has  been  won  over  the  secret  and  awful  forces  of 
nature  until  the  most  terrific  come  and  go  at  a 
child's  touch,  the  fabulous,  heaped  up  wealth 
which  gluts  and  cloys  the  arrogant  proprietary 
class  while  the  workers,  its  creators,  starve  in 
the  streets,  in  a  word  the  marvels,  both  of 
achievement  and  failure,  which  make  up  our 
modern  life — what  are  these  but  the  vestibule  to 
that  spacious  mansion  which  future  humanity 
shall  build  as  the  fit  home  of  the  soul  of  man? 
Again  we  read  the  inexplicable  drama  of  prog- 
ress, onward,  upward,  to  an  end  unknown. 

But  though  the  ultimate  purpose,  the  final 
goal,  of  the  evolving  universe  be  hid  from  us, 
though  we  may  not  even  guess  at  "that  far  off 
divine  event  towards  which  the  whole  creation 
moves,"  the  evolution  itself,  the  ordered  change, 
the  systematic  growth,  the  upward  urge  of  all 


150  PURITANISM 

phenomena,  cannot  be  gainsaid.  Here  science  has 
spoken,  authoritatively,  determinatively.  The 
evolutionary  process  is  a  fact,  the  basic  and  su- 
preme fact  of  all  our  knowledge,  though  its  pur- 
pose be  unguessed.  And  of  this  evolution,  in  its 
social  aspect,  each  successive  industrial  system 
and  its  concomitant  social  order,  are  ranged 
steps  in  the  stairway  of  human  progress,  each 
of  which  must  be  duly  traveled  in  the  unfolding 
of  human  history.  And  each  of  the  succeeding 
moral  systems  and  codes,  growing  out  of  the  in- 
dustrial system  and  mirroring  and  sustaining  the 
accompanying  social  order,  is  but  the  staff 
wherewith  humanity  for  the  moment  assists  it- 
self in  the  long  ascent  of  those  unnumbered 
stairs  the  top  of  which  reaches  above  human 
ken,  into  the  realm  of  the  eternal.  For  those  of 
us  who  believe  in  the  ultimate  validity  and  basic 
righteousness  of  the  cosmos,  each  of  these  moral 
systems  must,  in  its  due  place  and  time,  partake 
of  this  transcendent  validity  and  must  find  there- 
in its  cosmical  justification  and  obligation.  Duly, 
in  its  place  and  period,  it  must  be  obeyed  as  the 
law  of  a  social  evolution  the  dominant  note  of 
which  is  the  upward  urge  of  life.  In  this  way 
the  religious  sanction  returns  to  morality;  not, 
indeed,  in  the  old  guise  of  post  mortem  rewards 
and  punishments,  but  rather  as  an  opportunity 


ABSTRACT   MORALITY  151 

for  the  conscious  ordering  of  conduct  in  har- 
mony with  the  divine  purpose  of  "the  loving 
Laborer  through  space  and  time." 

"Duly,  in  its  place  and  period!"  Yes.  But 
what  if  the  conventional  moral  system  be  found 
decadent,  be  found  formal  and  barren  and  out- 
worn, be  found  without  any  sure  word  or  clear 
leading  in  the  turgid  rush  of  social  change? 
What  if  the  social  order  itself,  grown  too  narrow 
for  the  expanding  powers  and  needs  of  human 
life,  grown  foul  with  vermin  and  open  to  all  the 
winds  of  heaven,  like  an  inhospitable  house,  be 
found  no  longer  possible  of  human  habitation? 
In  an  era  when  the  supreme  business  of  man 
is  to  refashion  society,  when  the  destruction  of 
the  old  is  his  highest  duty,  just  as  the  building  of 
the  new  is  his  most  onerous  labor,  what  validity 
or  binding  obligation  shall  be  claimed  for  moral 
laws  which  have  become  but  echoes  of  an  in- 
tolerable past,  which  are  the  requirements  of  a 
cultural  integument  from  which  humanity  must, 
at  its  peril,  escape?  Here  we  enter  upon  a  field 
of  casuistry  prolific  of  disputation  a^id  of  little 
else.  In  a  general  way,  the  rule  may  be  laid 
down  that  so  long  as  the  social  scheme  remains 
fairly  intact,  as  a  practical  working  system,  its 
morality,  in  so  far  as  it  does  not  conflict  with  or 
impede  the  coming  of  the  new  order,  is  to  be 


152  PURITANISM 

obeyed.  But  the  duty  of  conformity  ceases  the 
moment  social  change  may  be  facilitated  by  the 
disregard  of  conventional  canons  of  conduct. 
Thus  the  workingman  of  today,  though  suffering 
unbearable  injustice  and  wretchedness  from  the 
institution  of  private  property  in  the  means  of 
life,  is  nevertheless  not  a  thief,  for  thievery  does 
not  assail  the  institution  of  private  ownership 
but  merely  substitutes  one  private  owner  for  an- 
other. Yet  this  same  workingman  is  held  bound 
by  every  impulse  of  right  conduct,  as  well  as 
by  every  instinct  of  self-preservation,  to  further 
in  all  reasonable  ways  the  confiscation  of  private 
property  by  the  working  class,  since  in  this  way 
he  both  achieves  his  own  freedom  and  advances 
the  progress  of  the  race.  For  that  same  trans- 
cendental sanction  which,  springing,  as  we  have 
seen,  from  the  orderly  unfolding  of  the  universe, 
supports  each  moral  system  in  the  heyday  of  its 
usefulness,  equally  demands,  in  parturient  eras 
like  our  own,  not  merely  a  passive  acquiescence 
in  the  work  of  social  reconstruction,  but  rather 
that  each  one,  inspired  by  the  holy  spirit  of 
revolt,  should  labor  and  agonize  and  freely  offer 
himself  for  the  speedy  perfecting  of  that  work. 
The  duty  of  the  present  is  not  that  of  patient 
obedience  but  of  indomitable  rebellion,  a  rebel- 


ABSTRACT   MORALITY  153 

lion  which  also,  in  its  "due  place  and  period," 
fulfills  the  sovereign  purpose  of  the  world. 

As  to  a  final  morality,  wrought  out  of  a  stable, 
just  and  perfect  social  order,  which  shall  once 
and  for  all  pronounce  upon  all  our  conduct, 
whether  it  be  good  or  ill,  we  cannot  speak.  Such 
a  perfect  ethical  comprehension,  such  a  final  and 
unalterable  valuation  of  each  act  and  deed  of 
man,  may  be  reached  in  that  unified  and  homo- 
geneous society  which  shall  be  reared  upon  the 
basis  of  co-operative  industry.  Or  it  may  be 
that,  so  far  as  specific  moral  precept  is  con- 
cerned, finality  will  ever  remain  unattainable, 
that  shifting  human  relations  will  ever  require 
new  statements,  fresh  formulas,  new  admeasure- 
ments of  conduct.  Nor  is  it  particularly  neces- 
sary that  this  question  should  be  determined. 
For  us,  with  our  partial  vision,  moving  in  the 
half  light  of  a  still  semi-barbarian  culture,  in  the 
presence  of  vast,  clouded,  and  as  yet  alien  vistas 
of  life,  must  remain  as  truth  the  summing  up  of 
the  great  master  of  English  verse. 

"Our  little  systems  have  their  day; 
They  have  their  day  and  cease  to  be: 
They  are  but  broken  lights  of  thee,        .^ 
And  thou,  oh  Lord,  art  more  than  they." 


DEBS 

His  Life,  Writings  and  Speeches. 

Socialists  are  not  hero-worshipers.  We 
do  not  put  our  faith  in  leaders.  Methods 
of  class  warfare  do  not  come  from  the 
brains  of  the  isolated  scholar,  but  from 
the  brains  and  experience  of  fighters. 

That  is  why  we  publish  the  life,  writ- 
ings and  speeches  of  Eugene  V.  Debs. 
He  has  never  set  himself  up  as  a  leader 
of  the  labor  movement.  But  by  choice 
of  it,  joy  in  it,  love  of  it,  he  has  remained 
a  part  of  the  movement  itself.  Sepa- 
rate him  from  the  revolutionary  work- 
ing class  movement  and  you  lose  Eugene 
V.  Debs.  He  is  bone  of  its  bone,  flesh 
of  its  flesh.  His  very  life,  his  hopes 
and  aims  are  interwoven  into  the  very 
mesh  of  the  labor  movement. 

All  his  writings  that  he  thinks  i worth 
preserving  are  included  in  this  book, 
which  also  tells  the  story  of  his  life  and 
work. 

Two  large  editions  have  been  sold  at  $2.00  a  copy. 
But  Debs  does  not  wish  to  make  money  from  the 
book;  he  wishes  to  carry  the  message  of  socialism 
to  an  ever  growing  circle  of  readers.  He  has  there- 
fore authorized  our  co-operative  publishing  house 
to  bring  out  a  new.  neat,  compact  library  edition, 
illustrated,  and  containing  over  500  pages,  at  a 
dollar  a  copy,  postpaid,  with  special  prices  to  com- 
rades who  buy  in  quantities  and  put  their  energy 
into  finding  new  readers.  We  will  send  five  copies 
by  express  prepaid  for  $3.00  or  twenty  copies  by 
express  prepaid  for  $10.00.  Address 

Charles  H.  Kerr  &  Company 

118  West  Hinzie  St.,  Chicago 


INTERNATIONAL 

SOCIALIST  REVILE 

is  the  FIGHTING  MAGAZINE  OF 
THE  WORKING  CLASS. 

It  is  the  only  great  ILLUSTRATED 
periodical  that  stands  for  the  revolution- 
ary movement  of  the  proletariat. 

Month  by  month  the  great  capitalists 
are  invading  new  fields,  subduing  the 
forces  of  nature,  and  enrolling  more  men, 
women  and  children  in  the  ranks  of  the 
workers. 

Month  by  month  the  wage-workers  are 
closing  up  their  ranks  and  fighting  here 
one  skirmish  and  there  another,  in 
England,  France,  Japan,  in  Butte  and 
Philadelphia,  sometimes  winning,  some- 
times losing,  but  always  growing  into  a 
sense  of  solidarity  that  will  strengthen 
them  in  the  greater  battles  to  come. 

The  REVIEW  keeps  its  readers  in 
touch  with  each  stride  of  industrial  de- 
velopment and  each  new  step  toward  a 
more  complete  organization  of  the  wage- 
workers  of  the  world. 

Comrade  J.   Edward  Morgan,  of  Sat* 


Francisco,  writes:  "The  Review  does 
not  preach  or  teach.  It  is  a  mirror  held 
before  the  eyes  of  the  worker,  who  sees 
himself  and  the  society  in  which  he 
moves.  His  life  and  his  environment  be- 
come intelligible  to  him.  The  Review 
unveils,  cog  by  cog,  the  ever-growing  in- 
dustrial machine  that  enslaves  him,  must 
soon  starve  him.  It  is  a  terrible  awak- 
ener. 

"I  have  read  from  the  Review  to  many 
working  class  audiences  and  have  seen 
them  become  keenly  interested  as  the 
meaning  of  the  growth  of  the  iron  man 
(machine)  flashed  home. 

"Men  may  not  be  persuaded  to  liberty. 
But  the  Review  wHl  make  them  feel  the 
fire  and  smell  the  smoke  and  all  hands 
will  vacate  the  burning  house,  regardless 
of  ethics,  customs  or  what  not. 

"The  Review  stifles  with  the  smoke  of 
industrial  activity.  The  worker  sniffs  it 
on  every  page,  interprets  his  own  shop 
experiences  by  the  lesson  pointed,  and 
SELF-INTEREST  pushes  him  into  the 
army  of  revolt." 

Monthly,  100  pages,  illustrated;  lOc  a 
copy;  $1.00  a  year;  order  from  address 
on  first  page  of  this  booklet. 


PURITANISM 

What  is  the  economic  basis  for  the  demand, 
which  we  see  occasionally  cropping  out  even 
now,  to  limit  the  length  of  a  girl's  bathing 
suit  by  law? 

Perhaps  you  have  never  thought  of  it,  but 
the  pious  horror  of  a  short  bathing  suit  is 
closely  related  to  early  rising,  political  reform, 
Sunday  baseball  games,  religous  revivals,  the 
"double  standard  of  morality,"  the  nude  in 
art,  woman  suffrage,  and  the  consumption  of 

MINCE  PIE 

If  such  a  statement  seems  to  you  far- 
fetched, then  you  will  derive  instruction  as 
well  as  enjoyment  from  a  close  reading  of 
Clarence  Meily's  new  book,  "Puritanism," 
which  is  just  off  the  press. 

This  little  book  will  enable  the  American 
people,  and  the  British  as  well,  to  understand 
themselves  as  they  never  have  before,  because 
we  have  inherited  a  large  share  of  our  ideas 
from  our  Puritan  ancestors.  It  presents  a 
fascinating  study  in  that  theory  which  has 
done  so  much  to  make  clear  to  Socialists  the 
meaning  of  life — the  theory,  nay,  the  fact, 
that  the  way  people  make  their  living  largely 
determines  their  notions  of  what  is  right  and 
moral  and  proper.  No  American  should  fail 
to  read  this  book.  It  will  enable  him  to 
understand  the  history  of  this  country  better 
than  a  library  full  of  ordinary  text  books. 
It  will  clean  out  of  his  brain  any  remaining 
infection  left  there  by  past  teachings  and  will 
enable  him  to  see  clearly  through  problems 
out  of  which  our  capitalist-minded  lawmakers, 
preachers,  professors,  and  editors  are  making 
a  mess.  A  reading  of  this  book  will  forever 
prevent  any  Socialist  legislator  from  meddling 
with  middle  class  "moral  reforms."  Attrac- 
tively bound  in  cloth  and  well  printed.  Price, 
60  cents  postpaid. 

CHARLES  H.  KERR  &  COMPANY, 
118  West  Kinzie  St.,  Chicago. 


THE  ROSE  DOOR 

The  Story  of  a  House  of  Prostitution 
By  ESTELLE  BAKER 

It  is  roughly  estimated  that  there  are  over 
500,000  women  and  girls  in  the  United  States 
who  earn  their  living  by  the  sale  of  their 
bodies.  Much  has  been  written  about  "the 
oldest  of  all  the  professions;"  investigations 
have  been  made;  statistics  prepared;  judg- 
ments pronounced  and  rigorous  means  of 
suppressing  prostitution  have  been  attempted 
— to  no  avail.  It  has  remained  for  Socialism 
to  discover  the  Cure  for  the  Social  Evil. 

Miss  Baker's  book  is  not  a  preachment,  nor 
a  theory  or  a  "study,"  but  a  living,  gripping 
story  of  the  Actual  Lives  of  four  Women  of 
the  Streets,  with  all  the  heart  hunger,  the 
yearning  for  maternity,  and  the  sordid  com- 
mercialism with  which  the  Public  Woman  is 
always  at  war. 

Read  The  Rose  Door.  Go  down  into  the 
depths  of  pain  and  love  and  misery  with  your 
Sisters  of  the  Street.  There  you  will  find  the 
cause  of  their  degradation — and  the  cure  for 
the  great  Social  Evil. 

Get  this  book  for  your  daughters  and  your 
sons.  You  need  it  and  your  neighbor  will  be 
a  wiser  and  better  man  for  having  read  it. 
Handsomely  bound  in  cloth;  four  full-page 
ilustrations. 

Price,  One  Dollar.     We  pay  postage. 

Order  from  address  on  last  page  of  this  booklet 


OR 

Researches  in  the  Lines  of  Human 

Progress :    From  Savagery 

Through  Barbarism  to 

Civilization 

One  American  and  only  one  is  recog- 
nized by  the  universities  of  Europe  as 
one  of  the  world's  great  scientists.  That 
American  is  Lewis  M.  Morgan,  the  author 
of  this  book.  He  was  the  pioneer  writer 
on  the  subject.  His  conclusions  have  been 
fully  sustained  by  later  investigators. 

.  This  work  contains  a  full  and  clear  explanation 
of  many  vitally  important  facts,  without  which  no 
intelligent  discussion  of  the  "Woman  Question" 
is  possible.  It  shows  that  the  successive  marriage 
customs  that  have  arisen  have  corresponded  to 
certain  definite  'industrial  conditions.  The  author 
shows  that  it  is  industrial  changes  that  alter  the 
relations  of  the  sexes,  and  that  these  changes  are 
still  going  on.  He  shows  the  historical  reason  for 
the  double  standard  of  morals"  for  men  and 
women,  over  which  reformers  have  wailed  in  vain. 
And  he  points  the  way  to  a  cleaner,  freer,  happier 
life  for  women  in  the  future,  through  the  triumph 
of  the  working  class.  All  this  is  shown  indirectly 
through  historical  facts;  the  reader  is  left  to  draw 
his  own  conclusions. 

Cloth,  686  large  pages,  gold  stamping.  Until 
lately  this  book  could  not  be  bought  for  less  than 
$4.00.  Our  price  is  $1.60,  and  we  will  mail  the 
book  to  YOU  for  60c.  provided  you  send  $1.00  at 
the  tame  time  for  a  year's  subscription  to  the 
International  Socialist  Review.  Addrsss 

Charles  H.  Kerr  &  Company 

118  West  Kinzie  Street.  Chicago 


CUSTAVUS  MYERS' 

History  a  «w  Supreme  Court 

"In  this  original  and  exhaustive  work,  Mr. 
Myers  gives  from  a  vast  multitude  of  official  docu- 
ments the  actual  story  of  this  remarkable  and 
powerful  body,  the  like  of  which  exists  nowhere 
else  in  the  world.  Hitherto  the  history  of  this 
court  has  been  shrouded  in  the  densest  mystery, 
but  after  years  of  arduous  research  Mr.  Myers 
has  at  last  presented  the  complete  narrative.  And 
it  is  a  very  surprising  one.  The  storj;  of  th« 
Supreme  Court,  as  Mr.  Myers  presents  it  in  sober, 
matter-of-fact  fashion,  is  really  the  actual  history 
of  the  economic  development  of  the  United  States." 
— Toronto  Star. 

"A  volume  that  deserves  careful  reading,  and 
•which  merits  praise,  is  the  History  of  the  Supreme 
Court  of  the  United  States,  by  Gustavus  Myers, 
an  author  whose  reputation  has  been  previously 
established.  .  .  .  The  value  of  the  book  rests 
upon  the  fact  that  practically  all  its  charges  are 
substantiated  by  documentary  proof.  .  .  .  The 
volume  on  the  whole  is  an  eye-opener  for  the 
average  reader  because  it  shows  that  in  no  era 
since  the  Supreme  Court  was  established  has  it 
not  been  under  the  fire  of  public  criticism,  and 
its  members,  while  escaping  impeachment,  have 
been  under  suspicion  of  casting  their  votes  on 
decisions  that  were  favorable  to  friends  or  cor- 
porations with  which  friends  are  affiliated.  .  .  . 
Not  the  least  interesting  part  of  the  book  are 
the  chapters  devoted  to  the  present  chief  justice 
and  to  the  judges  recently  appointed  by  President 
Taft.  They,  too,  are  human,  as  the  text  will 
disclose." — Boston  Globe. 

"Mr.  Myers  has  delved,  as  no  other  author  has 
done,  down  into  the  bottom  and  beginning  of 
things,  and  brought  up  the  hidden  truths  of 
municipal,  state  and  government  affairs.  That  they 
have  come  up  reeking  with  slime  and  mud  is  no 
fault  of  the  author.' —  Oregon  Journal. 

Extra    cloth,    823    large    pages,    $2.00    postpaid. 

CHARLES  H.  KERR  &  COMPANY 

113  West  Kinzie  St.  Chicago,  111. 


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